I think I’m largely in agreement with you – yes, I absolutely want people to respect each other, and start from that perspective. Mostly because there are a lot of super lazy jokes about groups of people that aren’t funny because they’re not clever, they’re just bigoted.

But when people say, “too much political correctness”, that tends to be what they’re talking about. E.g., some jerk makes a joke about their pronouns being attack/helicopter or something, showing that they don’t understand pronouns and that they don’t understand that humor should involve something unexpected, not something super expected, if one assumes the person has bigoted ideas.

But plenty of people make good humor with various groups because they don’t fall into those standard tropes.

And if someone is punching up, absolutely respect should be kept to the bare minimum.

Or, in other words, basic respect is about learning about a topic. “Too much respect” would be never pointing out various oddities in a group that you otherwise have basic respect for.

Because, yeah, people act in funny ways. Especially when acting as a group.

Being creative does oftentimes require taking risks, and oftentimes unintentionally crossing lines, so I’m with you on that.

On the other hand, the only mention of women being how they’re required to go commando is… not likely to be an environment women want to be in.

As for political correctness, to quote Neil Gaiman:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

Maybe there are times when that’s not what’s happening, but most of the times I see it used, it’s people complaining that they can’t act like jerks without consequence.

It automatically restoring all those unsaved notes has made me so lazy.

The only sensible logic I could come up with is where a new version is broken in some awful way, but an older version is not.

But, obviously, that only works if the people haven’t already upgraded.

I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.

FidoNet does still exist, but it’s commonly called “fight-o-net” for a reason, as there are… some characters there.

If you do resurrect your node, I’d suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it’s the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.

Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop’s day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you’d like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.

But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.

And if you’re wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.

Yeah, I think they could’ve done that one better, though I guess they had a variety of reasons why they didn’t have those campaigns. Some things that just didn’t work right because of it not being the AoEI engine.

But I don’t recall specifics on that one, as I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention, given that, despite having the Rome DLC, I haven’t actually played the AoEI content, at all.

That said, I thought I recall some rumors about them working on porting over the original campaigns, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you get those campaigns eventually.

But, yeah, not yet, and not something they mentioned specifically in this update, in any way. At least as far as I read.