Pencilnoob

Not OP but mine is natural gas and definitely produces trace amounts of noticeable gases when run. It gives me a very mild headache

I absolutely loved Martian Chronicles as a 10yo. I found it disturbing, but it also helped me develop a sense of empathy at a critical time when I was a real asshole

My hypothesis is it's a combination of body fat distribution, blood flow rate, and surface area to mass ratios.

I find it mildly amusing to imagine that it says "Hot Girls, Fat Arby's", which is a subversion of the expectation, and also elicits the image of a big fat Arby's mascot

I didn't get this at first, but wow yeah really it says it right on the shirt

As an unrepentant Fate Core player / GM, I love playing weird characters with lots of flaws to harvest the sweet Fate Points.

My favorite characters will have a ridiculous backstory with lots of grudges, fueds, romances, and allies who show up all the time in play.

My favorite concept yet was a character in a superhero game that has a pinnacle skill of Contacts (and second of Resources), because he is normal human who is owed favors from nearly every superhero in the universe. He's a wheeler and dealer of tech both medical, alien, arcane, and divine. Superheroes are always reaching out needing something extra, and he takes payments in favors. Any given time there's a fight he can call in a favor from any superhero I can imagine (while he hides behind a wall or something). Of course if he doesn't roll well enough, the superhero in question was busy, tied up, unconscious, didn't have their phone, etc. And then he's in trouble! Good times.

That's the real reason it starts early: so two working parents can get the kids out the door and then still have time to get to work themselves

Ok, I see I've been grinding gold stake for too long,

the poor caretaker, I fear his long-standing duties here have... affected him

$10? How? I'm dead serious, if I get 300 chips in one hand, that only gets me $7, am I missing something obvious?!

Thanks!

My hypothesis is the decline is caused by a multifaceted change in environment:

• cost of living crisis caused by inflation, folks are making only about 1/3rd what their grandparents made for the same labor
• debt crisis caused by the above, crippling debt causes anxiety
• educational treadmill, folks are working harder for top jobs, so schooling takes longer and is much harder
• hormonal crisis, many young women are on hormonal birth control which is well known to significantly reduce libido in a large percentage of the population
• food supply crisis, cheap, poor quality highly-processed food make folks just slightly less healthy all the time, possibly can affect libido with lowered testosterone caused by preservatives
• social media crisis, evolution caused us to want to be nosy about 70 members of our tribe, not hundreds of millions. Social media is causing us to have the social equivalent of Daredevil's acute hearing, but it's addicting so folks can't easily shut it off (as I write on social media...)
• fitness crisis, many folks just aren't healthy enough to lift and run, so they have less testosterone which lowers libido for everyone regardless of sex/gender
• reproductive fear, folks realize they have it bad with little hope of improvement, so they don't want the same for their offspring
• perfectionism causing a lack of confidence, being able to see the best in the world at any second on your phone causes acute perfectionism that prevents folks from even trying. Look up rates of musical instrument playing to see how few are even starting compared to 20 years ago. Skills in an area lead to increased confidence which makes a person more confident
• protective parenting combined with extremely restrictive schooling, leads to less "free time" where folks can hang out and build social skills
• hyper niche porn on demand, every person can access the porn of their choice on demand at all times. This causes unrealistic tastes and lack of confidence.
• infection fears, everyone is taught from a young age to be afraid of STDs and pregnancy, so it's a looming fear in many
• entertainment quality, we've created the most addicting games, movies, shows, and apps. These make it more interesting to sit and zone out than socialize
• anxiety/depression crisis from the above leads to a population with lower libido, SSRIs are well known to reduce libido in a large subset of the population

All in all, we've got a society that is nearly perfectly designed to reduce libido in the population. Those that manage to avoid or ignore these challenges find a very small dating pool compared to decades past. Those that pair off are less likely to have offspring, such that we will likely have a population collapse in the next hundred years. Hopefully by then have figured enough of this out that we build a society that makes it easy to be a human who finds joy and love in other humans and not in a screen.