Fondots

Just pointing out some assumptions you're making and shoehorning in a couple of my own thoughts on the matter.

1. We're assuming that there is life elsewhere in the universe. (I personally tend to believe there is something, somewhere out there that could check the boxes to be considered "life" but it's not exactly a sure thing)

2. We're assuming that whatever life exists out there possesses a soul (If I did believe in souls, which I personally do not, I don't think that every living thing necessarily would have a soul- bacteria, fungus, plants, etc. I wouldn't think have souls, nor necessarily all animals, I don't think I'd say that things like placozoans, sea sponges, coral, and jellyfish have souls for example.)

3. We're assuming that those souls operate in a similar manner to our own and are compatible with us. As far as we can tell all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor, so all souls have at least have somewhat similar biological "hardware" (wetware? Squishyware?) to run on. Would our souls be compatible with life elsewhere in the universe that might be based around totally different chemistry?

4. Even if they're technically compatible, would our souls even be part of the same system as the souls of aliens? I think that in most belief systems that involve reincarnation, the point of reincarnation is to somehow build upon the souls' prior experiences on earth, to make up for or be punished for things you did wrong, to settle unfinished business, to inch closer to enlightenment with new experiences and knowledge, etc. Can you do that effectively if your soul reincarnates on an entirely different planet? Could, for example, the Dalai Lama, be an effective spiritual leader for the Tibetan people if he reincarnated somewhere near Betelgeuse? And if we are currently operating in 2 different "soul-ar" systems (couldn't resist the pun) what happens if first contact is made? Do our two soul cycles merge into one since our two civilizations would be able to have an impact on one another? Does it happen evenly across the entire human race? Would a member of, for example, the Sentinelese people, who would probably remain unaware of and have no impact on the affairs of aliens, be part of that merged system, or would their souls remain largely in their own bubble?

5. How fast can souls travel? Are they bound by the light speed limit that everything else in the universe seems to be, or can they go faster than that? If they can, does this open up some sort of back-door to FTL travel or communication where all we need to do is off somebody and let them reincarnate across the universe to awaken their latent memories of past lives? Can we encode information on a soul somehow and transmit it that way?

Sort of tangential to parts 2, 3, and 4, the Catholic Church, while not believing in reincarnation, has actually given some thought to the idea of alien souls, and determined that it's possible, even likely, that if there is intelligent life out there somewhere, that they may not be in need of Jesus' salvation in the same way humans are. Since they're not descended from Adam & Eve like they believe all humans are, they may not be burdened with original sin. So there's at least one religion that thinks alien souls may be, in some way, fundamentally different from our own.

Mechanically, I tend to avoid spellcaster type classes, mostly because I don't want to keep track of spell lists and such.

As far as roleplay goes, it depends a bit on who I'm playing with. The actual players rotate a bit, but in general I have 2 main groups I play with, and the type of character I play tends to be pretty different between them.

In the one group, I tend to play sort of the straight man. The other players aren't exactly running murder hobos, but a couple of them skew that direction, and their characters all tend to have big personalities and I tend to be the one who's keeping things a little grounded.

One of our longest-running campaigns was a 5e game that started out as sort of a weird mix of the Rise of Tiamat and Storm Kings Thunder modules that went way off-script. We had an angsty rogue, a drunken warlock who was using some home brew stuff that was roughly like The Fathomless from Tasha's but a few years before that was officially a thing, an elf barbarian who was absent for half the campaign, and a drow (sorcerer I think) who started off being sort of a Drizzt knock-off but shocked us with an amazing plot twist halfway through that he cooked up with the DM where he'd secretly been an agent of Tiamat the whole time... until Tiamat discarded him and we had to figure out what to do with him after that.

And then my character- Randall, a relatively by-the-book military veteran, sword-and-board fighter, who was nominally the leader of the group, he had a grudge against dragons from a previous battle he'd been in, and a bad case of "just when I thought I was out out, they pull me back in" being pretty sick of the adventuring life and really wanted to retire to a quiet farm somewhere, but adventuring was all he had ever known and he kept bouncing from one adventure to another unsure how to make the transition.

In my other group, I have a tendency to play the wildcard. The most extreme example of that was a pirate called Lotor the All-Beard (so named because he was a raccoon, and so covered in fur, he was "all beard")

Lotor was a filthy, chaotic idiot and the dice gods smiled upon him. He was remarkably skilled in all manner of crime, including, somehow, forgery despite being illiterate (He needed someone else to put the words together for him but with that and a handwriting sample he could masterfully forge any document needed.) He didn't speak the common tongue, so couldn't directly communicate with most of the party, but had a magical talking parrot (named Polly, of course) who translated for him (the bird was far more intelligent than Lotor and kind of hated him. Throughout the campaign there were many hints dropped that there was a lot more to this bird than met the eye, but Lotor was too dumb to pick up on any of it.) He stole from, cheated, swindled, and flirted with basically everyone he met, and pretty much just always let the intrusive thoughts win. If there were shenanigans afoot, it was usually his fault.

A lot of his criminal behavior stemmed from a bit of willful ignorance and childlike naivete about laws and social norms. I hadn't seen it at the time I created Lotor, but the Guardians of the Galaxy scene where the concept of theft being illegal is explained to Rocket was pretty much Lotor in a nutshell.

It was also a bit of a running joke that he was actually a fairly formidable and well-known pirate captain who ran a very tight and orderly ship (though a fair amount of those organizational skills may have actually been Polly,) but he considered himself to be "on shore leave" and so basically on vacation for the duration of the campaign and was cutting loose.

Those are sort of the two extremes, but probably my two most beloved characters, and kind of give an overall sense of the direction my characters tend to go with either group.

Kind of depends on how you define "race" (it's pretty much scientifically meaningless, so define it however the hell you like)

But we have several currently ongoing attempts at genocide happening around the world, that to me tells me that a hell of a lot of people out there care a whole lot about race.

American racism is particularly odd to me due to how broadly we categorize race, trying to lump people into a black/white/Hispanic/Asian/etc. category based on not much more than skin color. And we're also unusuallly open about the fact that racism is a thing here. A lot of the world kind of keeps it more on the down-low.

But if you go with narrower definitions of race, you'll see the same kind of things happening around the world as in America. I've seen people from the UK talk about Polish immigrants in much the same way people here talk about Mexicans, and that's not even going into the cluster fuck of how much of Europe treats Romani people. A whole lot of people in Asian countries have issues with other people from other Asian countries, or even different ethnic groups within their own countries (like Uyghurs in china.) Parts of Africa are patchworks of different ethnic groups that are often at each other's throats, and of course South Africa is still a long way from having its shit fully sorted out. A lot of white Australians have pretty significant biases against Aboriginal people.

I could go on.

There was a pretty large, family-run business near me, it was a pretty popular local landmark, and it sat on a pretty big property, probably a handful of acres.

The owner died, his kids didn't really want to run the place, so they did everything they could to run it into the ground so that they say that it wasn't profitable to avoid some of the backlash from closing it down.

They had some sort of scheme to turn it into housing for homeless veterans. Noble enough idea I suppose, though I don't know how they thought that was going to work, let alone be profitable.

Of course there was a bit of the usual NIMBY backlash, veterans or not, a lot of people don't particularly want some low income housing project springing up in their neighborhood.

But more importantly, it just didn't seem like anyone was particularly interested in living there.

This is sort of the rural end of the suburbs. We're not out in the country, I'd hesitate to even call it exurban, but things are less dense, not much is walkable, no public transportation, there's not all that much around. A couple of the basics are nearby like a grocery store, but not much beyond that.

If you have a car and money for gas, it's not a terrible place to be, pretty much anything you could want is within about a 30-45 minute drive, if traffic cooperates, you might even be able to get downtown in the city in about an hour.

But thinking about it in the context of a bunch of homeless people, what the hell are they supposed to do? Not many opportunities for them to find work around there, certainly not anything well-paying enough to help them improve their situation by much. If they need any sort of mental health or drug/alcohol treatment, their options would be severely limited there. It's not at all convenient to the VA hospital nearest to us. And unless they manage to get their hands on a car, they'd basically be stuck there to sit at home, or maybe wander around town and do nothing in particular.

So that project never got off the ground.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I'm way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it's very likely that I'm just out of the loop

But I hadn't heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren't telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

There's a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there's a much bigger part that doesn't want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those "I've become my dad" moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who's ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I'm giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

At work I once received a call from someone who worked at a tree service company- trimming trees, tree removal, relocating trees, etc.

She identified herself as the branch manager.

Got a hunch that their idea of air frying chicken is pre-cooked and frozen chicken tenders

I've known muskies to do something similar- swim around at the surface with their head out of the water.

I remember looking into it, and it's definitely a thing, but no one seems to know why exactly they do it. There's a few theories that have to do with the oxygen concentration at the surface, regulating temperature, buoyancy, etc. but the one I personally like to subscribe to is the same as this, that they're just looking around.

It makes me feel a little less bad about not being able to catch one if they're at least more intelligent and curious than the average bass or bluegill or whatever else I'm pulling out of their lake.

I grew up in a small suburb just outside of a major city, overall a pretty liberal and urbanized place.

The town had it's own garbage trucks, all the years I lived there I never remember them missing a trash pickup. The neighboring towns didn't have their own trucks but still provided municipal pickup just contracted through some company and they were similarly pretty good.

I now live towards the more rural end of that same county. I'd still consider it to be in the suburbs, but it's a much less densely populated area, with some woods and a handful of small farms around, and while still fairly liberal, it definitely skews more conservative than the town I grew up in.

So this town does not provide trash service for its residents. It's pretty much up to everyone to make their own arrangements with any of a half dozen or so trash companies in the area.

And it's an absolute shit-show. They're all constantly missing trash pickups, constantly raising their prices, one time the company I was with got bought out by another company and they decided they were going to stop providing residential pickup service in my area so I had to find another company to take my money, and because we have all of these different companies with different pickup schedules it seems like anywhere you go there's constantly a trash truck slowing down traffic.

Because the libertarian dipshits in my area would rather pay more for worse service than abide by a smaller bump in their taxes to get reliable municipal services.

Similarly a lot of roads in my area are bullshit tar & chips instead of proper paving, it doesn't last long, loose stones are always getting kicked up, the motorcycle riders in my area complain that they're dangerous, etc.

A lot of my town is on wells and septic tanks instead of city water and sewer. There are allegedly plans to expand the parts of the town that can get hooked up to the municipal water and sewer lines, but they've been saying that at least since I moved here about 5 years ago and I haven't seen any real progress on that. I am hooked up to the municipal lines, but I have some friends who aren't and are hoping to get hooked up to it, and every time they ask they get told that their street is on the list to get hooked up but no one seems to know when, so they're constantly juggling whether they want to do some overdue maintenance on their aging septic system or if it's worth toughing it out until they eventually can get hooked up.

And probably the worst is the police department (InB4 ACAB) it's a part time department so they're not actually on duty overnight or most weekends and our area gets covered by state police when they're not on duty (which I believe the town actually pays for)

Now if there's any town that could probably get away with just not having its own police department, it's probably mine. I work in the county dispatch center, I know what their workload is like, if they handle a dozen incidents a week, including traffic stops for speeding tickets and such, they've had a busy week.

But of course most of what does happen in town is overnight and over the weekend, because that's when people are home. We don't exactly have a lot of businesses in town, so most people are just straight-up not around during the day.

The state police coverage is terrible. They cover a pretty large area of other semi rural departments without their own police or part time departments like mine, so often when they're needed the only available troopers are a couple towns away.

They also will only enforce state laws, and won't bother themselves with any local ordinances, so if you have, for example, a noise complaint, you're SOL, because odds are your neighbors are having loud parties and shooting off fireworks after the local police are off-duty for the night. They might be able to cite them for it later, but no one's gonna be going out to shut them up right now while you're trying to sleep.

No one likes the state police coverage, but they also don't want to pay the taxes it would take to have an actual full-time police department. A couple years ago there was talk of joining up with a couple neighboring towns that are currently covered full-time by state police, to form a full-time regional department that would cover all 3 towns, but those other towns also didn't want to increase taxes to pay for it.

We're at or reaching a tipping point where I'm not sure that's true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we're talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn't already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we're running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren't really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I'm not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don't really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There's a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don't think there's as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

Before I was born, my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack

Common enough story, except

They were visiting family in Poland, we're American

And this was the 1980s

So the problem was how to get a corpse back to the US.

Embalming was not common in Poland at the time, not sure what the current situation is there, but in this case it was kind of needed. Shipping something the size of a casket across the atlantic on short notice is kind of a lot to figure out for normal people in the best of times, but especially tricky for a bereaved family, in a foreign country, where they barely speak the language, and a whole host of Cold war political bullshit, and this was no small feat.

So they managed to find one of the few local funeral homes who were able to embalm him

And stuffed him into the cheapest wooden coffin they could acquire to ship him back.

And of course, there were some customs hold-ups that delayed things to make sure they weren't smuggling anything back with him I suppose.

I believe the whole process took a few weeks.

Luckily American money went a long way in Poland at the time. My family is not wealthy, but they were basically treated like celebrities there, flash a little American cash and you were bumped to the front of the line and got preferential treatment for everything, and from the US perspective, everything was dirt cheap.

A couple stories to illustrate that- one day they're out in Warsaw with their relative Wojtek, and they're looking for a place to eat. My grandfather spied a nice-looking restaurant. They go to the door and Wojtek is told that they wouldn't be able to seat them. My grandfather gets a bit angry and points out that the restaurant was almost empty. When they found out they had Americans with them they were welcomed in with open arms.

My grandfather ordered a steak, Wojtek got a bit of sticker shock seeing the menu and ordered a hot dog. When my grandfather found out that's what he ordered, he called the waiter back over and told them that Wojtek would also have a steak. He said it was too late and they'd already started the hot dog, so my grandfather said to wrap them up and they'd take them to go, and ordered the steak. A steak dinner there for the whole group, probably around 4-6 people, cost peanuts for an American at the time, but the Polish relatives they were staying with had been saving up things like sugar rations for weeks or months in preparation for hosting my family, and steak was definitely not on their regular menu.

There's also the story of when Wojtek visited the US (coincidentally at the exact same time as the USSR fell apart, but that's another long story) and literally broke down in tears at the sight of an American grocery store. I know the grocery store they would have went to, it was not a big or particularly impressive store, today it is a kind of small-ish CVS.

Another time while in Poland (they visited several times back in the day) my grandmother went to get her hair done while she was there. She worked as a hair dresser for most of her life, so while she was waiting in line she was watching them cut hair, and pointed out one lady and said that she wanted her to do her hair. She was told that's not how things worked there and that shed get whoever was available when it was her turn. Until she flashed some American cash and they bumped her up to the front of the line so she could have her hair cut by the hair dresser she wanted.

Anyway, circling back to my dead grandfather, they eventually got his body back to the US, stuffed him into a nicer casket, had a funeral, and there he is to the ground to this day.

But the story doesn't quite end there. What became of the casket they shipped him back in?

It sat in the funeral homes attic for a couple decades. It was cheap, but it wasn't a bad casket, just not what's in-demand for the American funeral industry, and believe it or not, there's not a lot of demand (or supply for that matter) for second-hand caskets.

Then one day, some guy, who actually happens to be a second cousin or something of mine, decides he wants an actual coffin to use as a Halloween decoration. So he calls around to the local funeral homes to see what they can do for him.

He calls up this place, and they basically say "we have just the thing for you" and so that's where that is now.