Mossy Feathers

The first PC I used was a 400mhz Celeron running windows 95. Can’t remember how much RAM, but at some point I upgraded the hard drive and I loved swapping out the GPUs on it for shits and giggles (my dad had multiple GPUs for some reason, two pci, one agp, and I wasn’t even 10 yet and couldn’t really tell the difference they made in my games, it just made me feel smart which was all that mattered). Mostly played Need for Speed 2 and 3, Age of Empires 2, SimCity 3000, Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon and some magic school bus edutainment stuff. By the time I got rid of it, it was running windows 2000.

SimCity 4 made me upgrade to a 3200+ AMD Athlon (socket 939, with an ASRock motherboard that supported dual channel memory, wow). Originally it had a 128mb Nvidia MX 4000, but by the end of its life it had 4gb of ram and an Nvidia 9600 GSO. It could play Crysis at 1280x1024@10-15fps with everything on low. At the time I considered that playable. Since I’d already been forced into sharing it with my sister, she took it after I upgraded again and eventually it got sent to Goodwill.

Now I have an old XP machine that belonged to my grandparents (2200 sempron w/ 2gb ram and the old Nvidia MX4000 I had put in it so I could play games at their house) and wish I hadn’t let my sister get rid of my Athlon PC because I’ve been thinking about upgrading that PC to an Athlon.

Red pill if it means I go back in time to when I was 6yrs old. Blue pill if not.

Edit: having to live through puberty again would be painful, but there’s a fair amount of stuff I could, and likely would, do a lot differently.

It actually potentially does. I’d suggest looking into Project 2025. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a political battle plan being put forward by a bunch of hard-right think tanks with substantial connections which would effectively establish a theocracy in the US. My understanding is that part of the plan hinges on the president basically removing anyone who can stop him and replace them with sycophants (which they’re currently populating a list of). The idea is that if they’re able to remove enough people, they can do whatever they want. They don’t need a majority in the supreme court or house of representatives because they can just ignore them; the sycophants will follow whatever orders they’re given regardless of what the house or court says.

To put it another way, they’ve realized the house and scotus only have power if that power is respected; if they remove anyone in-between the president and the other branches who’d say “no” and replace them with yes-men, then there’s no one to stop the president from doing whatever he wants. That said, I’d be willing to bet the moment the president says “no” to the scotus is the moment they’ll make a show of how much power they truly have, but it’ll get really bloody if that happens.

Remember when Y2K was going to potentially end the world, but it didn’t thanks to experts working 'round the clock?

Remember when corporations turned around and got pissy because Y2K was successfully avoided, claiming that it was all a big hoax?

Remember how it’s now taught in some places that Y2K was a hoax and you can’t trust experts?

No wonder the world struggled with COVID.