BTW, human tissue might not be targeted by a bacteriophage virus, but our gut is filled with beneficial bacteria. This is why people get the runs from antibiotica and why there’s shit transplants.
Most viruses are probably not surviving the acid bath that is our stomach, though.
First we’d need to define “internet” for this purpose. Does classic mail qualify? It certainly can carry more data than pidgeons, and if you can still have computers you might get relatively close to the 90s internet by sending data by mail (especially when you’re communicating with people within a day’s travel, rather than on the other side of the earth).
Other than that, you can do a lot with visual signals. In the Discworld novels, they developed a kind of optical telegraph network with a technique that is somewhat similar to ship flag communication, and optical telegraphy exists/existed in the real world, too, though it never got much traction. If you have computers, you might be able to get pretty alright data rates with something like that.
Sapient creatures are people, yes. Especially when they speak human/humanoid language, which is true for many (most?) dragons in tabletop settings and even Lord of the Rings. In Faerun (D&D) they can even easily transform into humanoids.
Dragons are generally much bigger than PCs or most other creatures, therefore whatever a sapient dragon does is “being the bigger person”.
I’d assume they just don’t care.
Weird, we’re experiencing the opposite in Europe.
I think they tend to have more shenanigans than LotR (though even LotR isn’t zero shenanigans, especially the movies).
The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. I’d assume that books were still more expensive back then relative to people’s incomes, and they were also the only way to access that content while today you have e-books, PDFs, YouTube-videos or even websites, which are often available for free (not necessarily legally).
On top of that, many literary devices are unrealistic or exaggerated.
Eyeglasses are an interesting case, because there seems to be a causal relationship between being nearsighted and staying inside a lot as a kid, which used to be mostly people who read books or just spend a lot of time on school work. That’s less relevant now that kids stay inside to watch TV, play videogames or scroll on their phone, though. Also, many people who need glasses either didn’t have the means (e.g. no access to eye doctors, no money for glasses; probably not as important nowadays in most wealthy countries) or choose to not wear them due to vanity, and both of those reasons are kind of orthogonal to adjectives like “intelligent” or “intellectual”.
How many people actually collect books for show? That seems uncommon and it should usually be fairly easy to tell for people who are somewhat well-read.
The thing with chess is that it’s not fun if you aren’t any good at it, and the difference between people who are somewhat good and those who aren’t is pretty big. You can get there with pure perseverance (same with most other things that gets listed here, probably), but most people tend to pick hobbies that they don’t have a hard time with.
TBH I got it specifically to make chip music, in like 2011. Making music on it is pretty cool actually, but while I did try a couple of games on it it didn’t really wow me. Even beyond the outdated technology, I don’t really like playing games that don’t let you quickload, especially when they’re actually kind of hard or generally have a lot of unskippable repetition.
Only console I ever got was the original Game Boy. But I’ll definitely upgrade my PC at some point, there’s only so many games I actually like and I don’t think I’ll be content just never playing the next Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ll have to upgrade my PC anyway at some point just for regular PC things, might as well buy a new GPU, too.
I might consider stopping when there’s some new ubiquitous gaming technology that I’m just not into (e.g. I still haven’t tried a VR game and I’m not keen on changing that anytime soon).
I looked up ephedrine, as far as I could tell the side effects were quite heavy compared to caffein or cocaine (though cocaine makes up for it by being very addictive).
I don’t think the political compass is working that well for this. WTF is leftist or authoritarian about the wizard’s behavior?
TIL classical Europe had cocoa and synthetic amphetamines
Hm, which of these are actually stimulants (i.e. substances that increase alertness)? The ones I know seem to be depressants, painkillers and hallucinogens, which seem less useful immediately before battle than stimulants.
Now I want to know what kinds of stimulants were available to Roman-era Germanic people!
Your brain is being a bro for once! Good job Tar_Alcaran’s brain 👍
Your sister sounds awful. What’s your question, though?