This happened to me IRL. As a kid one of my relatives heard I liked frogs. Every birthday, Christmas, etc., frogs. For years.

The shady thing was people interested in Linux that were ignorant of its licensing? Because of a cover image?

56k modems weren't even commonplace until the late 90s. Even if you could guarantee full download speeds then, you're looking at over two days for an ISO while your phone line would be occupied. And not everybody had a CD burner. If you value your time and disk space, it was worth it.

Go find something else to be angry at for no reason.

I'm under the impression don't really understand the culture or history of obtaining Linux. Yes, anybody can sell a disk with Linux on it. You can also download that same software for free. The data transfer rates back in the day meant that getting a physical disk was the quickest way to get 500Mb of packages etc. Plus not everybody wants to bootstrap from a tarball and chroot into a system to finish installing from files on their current OS. Flash drives and CD burners were not common yet. Physical media were a way to spread Linux, not make a quick buck off it. There was nothing shady about it.

Desiccant packets will help with moisture. You can just buy a bunch and dispose when they're full, but there are also some that you can refresh by baking them.

Buy some white pants, put them on, and just keep pulling them up. Congrats, you are now a Fresno nightcrawler.

My friend puts on an annual Halloween one shot RPG using dread (jenga tower pulls instead of dice rolls). Yesterday was his 13th. He gave us lab coats and safety goggles to get into character and had made some great props. It was a blast trying to piece back reality before we disappeared due to an experiment gone wrong.

Do some have bubbles in them, too?

The full fat one is the only one my partner will drink because it's actually creamy without using a bunch of gums on the ingredient list.

I've got a cute pair of Siamese mixes named Alfredo and Toast. Toast's points are darker and Alfredo is super silky. And then there's the orange Cornish Rex named Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke or just Paipo for short. It's a mouthful but not of food.

In the US, the power grid is split in 3: East, West, and Texas. For all three to go down would probably mean terrorism or war, so the military response would be relatively quick. If we ignore that and restrict response to mean relief for citizens, we have a recent record of federal response times for a Texas crisis: 4 days. It took two days for Texas to declare an emergency and two more days for the federal government to declare one on the federal level and send additional help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

Morrowind! I had to actually think a bit during quests, whether that was picking up on clues for what would make a good gift for a certain NPC that is part of the main quest or following directions to get somewhere. Getting used to the different traveling systems was enjoyable as well. I really liked the twist on the chosen one trope, especially when you meet some of the others. And the ways things fit the prophecy. It's so slow at first to get places on foot, but by the end you're whizzing around in the air. Breaking through the power curve is fun to build towards.

Modded Skyrim is pretty good, too, once you get rid of the gamey things like waypoints and the UI generally, put some decent quests in, justice for Parthanax, open cell cities, unlock spells, fixing the magic system, etc etc. But last time I touched something in my stack it all fell apart and I haven't felt like putting the time in to getting it to a decent state for a few years.

Ok, but why?