AtomicPurple

Same.
I literally said "what" out loud three times while reading this.

CDs have been making a slow comeback for the past year or two, and global CD sales actually went up last year for the first time in over a decade. If it's anything like the vinyl or cassette resurgence, I imagine it won't be too difficult to find places that sell CDs in a few years.

My partner has DID, and I've done a ton of research into it as a result. This story sounds extremely plausible to me.

I've read multiple case studies where people with multiple personalities will get out of whatever situation was causing the disassociation, and over time some of the personalities will vanish / die off. There was also a very extreme case I read about where the fractured personalities managed to coalesce into a new whole, but it was a different personality than the original. Basically a fully formed identity that was suddenly living the life of someone they didn't identify as, and whose memories they couldn't really recall.

Even in my partner's much less severe case of DID, the less prominent personalities will sometimes go dormant for months at a time. Haven't had any of them disappear fully yet, but it's at least theoretically possible from what I understand.

Not to mention that useful information was harder to find and more difficult to verify, especially for niche technical topics like the inner workings of specific games.

No, that's not it. It was a video livestream that had the stereotypical hippie looking host sitting on the floor behind a table taking calls. I don't know if anyone recorded it at the time, but I'd recognize it instantly if I saw it.

I missed that, but I remember around 2011 there was some new-age cult leader guy doing a call-in live stream that got trolled until he rage quit.

The water jets they use to cut metal only work because the stream is so narrow. Hydro pump is more like getting hit with multiple full-blast fire hoses at once

Referring to his hypothetical children as "offspring" is what tipped me off.

Yup.

I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.

After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I've since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn't been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.

Which sucks, because Arkane was one of my favorite developers before the quality of their output fell off over the past five years. I loved the Dishonored games, and Prey is the single best immersive sim ever made. I was looking forward to DeathLoop, but it ended up being kinda meh, and Redfall has been so universally panned that I haven't even bothered to try it.

Completely agree. This post is an incredible example of of "Yes, and... ", but I would never want to see it anywhere near actual improv due to the racism.

I can't believe this fake-ass greentext is still getting reposted almost a decade later.