In one story I thought up, this is a plot point.

An ancient race that never lies writes a legend: “This relic will allow one to undo any mistake in history. All it requires is a true sacrifice.”

They define true sacrifice as giving up that which you value most. They define what you value as something you’d protect above all else. This race never had any time travel research; they just presented this concept of “true sacrifice” as a joke and a thought exercise.

A lot of people will agree with the base sentiment “Violence is only justified when your life is threatened”.

Well, a huge number of people don’t really threaten in an obvious way by putting a gun in someone’s face. They will cut off people’s water, food, or air, or make such things prohibitively expensive to maintain. They will run legitimized “law enforcement strike operations”, but in effect, what they’re doing is from a state of peace, electing to murder people that have done them no harm.

Thankfully, or not, in 2025/2026, this stuff is a LOT more obvious than it was before. Politicians pointed out how recent initiatives would, provably, lead to thousands of deaths, and all of it was ignored with no counter-argument.

I agree with you about military being a matter of last resort. That’s the way it is for anyone sane, and doesn’t turn away the base point.

It’s a dismal thing for me to say to people:

Game exclusives are, by a given measure, anti-consumer; in the same way that charging consumers for games is. It is honestly a very effective way of building up a gaming community world.

We just okay it when we like the contender. No one faulted Valve for not bringing Half-Life elsewhere.

I own Subnautica 2 just to fight contract fuckery, now I think I should buy FactorioSlaveryCuteSim just to retaliate to what Nintendo did to Garry’s Mod.

Arc Raiders doesn’t because it built the value of items around needs other than direct selling. It’s a nice way to get you to think about direct utility rather than monetary use. Honestly, in most good RPGs large sums of money are not all that useful.

I readily acknowledge that 90-99% of poor pet experiences are because of impatient owners that can’t work within their pet’s animal limitations and habits.

But I don’t think people realize there are a minority of animals that are just mean. They understand what is wanted, they don’t need to do the things they do, but they do them anyway, and don’t care about the harm they cause.

It was tricky to get used to the Linux mentality of not really having a dedicated double-clickable “executable type”. But it makes sense - if you want to run code, that should be a planned action by an app that is dedicated to the task of setting up new code. (Package manager, IDE)