Tom Cowan

One of my brother-in-law's kids just received a diagnosis of covid -- right on the cusp of a large family gathering.
 
As I've vented before, both brother-in-laws do not think covid is a Big Deal. 🤬

some people in the world use DD/MM/YY format

Really sorry to hear that @Simon. Hope you recover rapidly and safely.

Bring me fish you will

Sorry Pattern Ghost, but your still dreaming, try again later to wake up.

So, I went to bed. Then I fell asleep, and dreamed that I was having trouble getting to sleep because of noises outside. Then I realized that it was a dream because a) I don't have a window over my bed and b) the construction work is on the other side of our building. So, I got super annoyed and decided to wake myself up. I tried turning on the light on my nightstand, which didn't work. Then all the stuff on my nightstand disappeared. Then I tried annoying my wife who was lying beside me into waking up (she wasn't, really, just in my dream, so it didn't work), then got out of bed and had some random doctor walk into my dream bedroom. So I grabbed him by the collar and yelled at him to wake me up. Which came out as a squeaky yell like the kind you do when you're half woken and your mind is waking up faster than your body . . . only I didn't, really. But it managed to finally wake me up.
 
Now I don't want to go back to sleep and dream that I can't sleep again.
 
Worse. Dream. Ever.

The last card works equally well for gamers.

Often the very fact that "they" are superficially the same as "us" is part of what frightens people. It fed the Cold War paranoia about Communists; they're hiding among us right now, and we can't even tell. It was what made the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers such a powerful metaphor for the era -- the invaders are taking over our minds, so the people you knew aren't the same people any more. And for the mutant analogy, you never know if your friends, your own family, will be revealed to be one of them.
 
(BTW America, we Canadians look like you, sound like you, and have infiltrated all aspects of your society. Watch your backs.)

Well, the IHA does discriminate. Mutants are their bogeymen, although supers who support them also rate as threats in their eyes. And that example highlights one of the justifications for classifying mutants differently -- pseudo-Darwinism. The IHA fears mutants will "supplant" present-day humans, which mirrors the concept from the X-comics that mutants represent a new "species" of humanity, "Homo superior." Their powers give them a practical evolutionary advantage, so left unchecked their numbers will only grow. Many people will point to Neanderthals as an example of what happens when two species compete for dominance on the same planet. One of them goes extinct.
 
Gods exist in set numbers, and mostly stay in their own god-realms. Mutates are the results of random accidents, or specific projects to deliberately create them. Tech-wielders' powers can, in principle, be duplicated for anyone. But mutants breed. And normal humans could unknowingly be breeding more of them.

There are a lot of reasons why they were called "the greatest generation," but the desire to be of service, to help people in times of need, and to not fear change or challenges, were qualities that many of them shared, whatever other beliefs they may have held. People like that truly are dying off, and we may have to hope for a younger generation to rediscover those qualities.