That's cool. Different strokes for different folks. I liked Mario RPG too.

So you played it in HS, not college?

I found that game in 1997 at the age of fifteen. I remember it so damned fondly. When did you meet it?

I might not have the patience for it these days, but as a teen in the mid-nineties, it was an awesome game. It came at the right time for me. If you found it earlier, and it got you away from thinking about highschool crap for a while, you might have loved it.

Buddy, there are a crap-ton of women in Iran who lead entire lives without dodging rocks and acid. There are messed-up groups of people in the states, too; but tourists don't need to live in fear of them.

That’s what I came to ask.

It is really weird. People have moved past imposing their religious standards on people, but think nothing of imposing their healthcare beliefs onto them. Has it become part of the social contract that you eat impeccably during your pregnancy?

The male outrage for this should be delicious, as they wring their hands over their world slipping away (or whatever it is that pisses them off about stuff like this.)

If people want authors to be able to develop good fiction, they have to support the venues in which it is published. I subscribe to Asimov's, and these days it's never been easier to read it. My iPad tells me when the next issue is out, and I download it. Candy Crush is fun, but it will leave you feeling empty. A good…

I subscribe to Asimov's via my iPad. It's a great way to read the magazine.

That’s a really, really good summary of everything he ever talked about. I thought it was pretty BS that his well of Murph/Cooze-outrageous-times-in-Vegas stories never seemed to go dry.

I can understand what she means. That's a good way of explaining the pervasiveness of that strange, strange trope.

This has been an education. Wow. I can't believe we aren't talking about a hundred years ago.

Wow. I'm amazed that something that so many women live in fear of could be have had such broad appeal. I wonder if they were getting off on the transgressiveness of it. Perhaps it's just a case of the world having done a number on women back then that they thought men being overcome with passion to the point of rape…

Don't most romance novels conform to the same formula, though? If the plagiarist kept the plot-points the same, what would be the thing that would give-up his game?

Can you give some examples of how things are different? I’d assume they guys are portrayed a bit more sensitively now, but I’m just thinking about how women still swoon for Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy and he's hundreds of years old.

Care to expand on that?

33 year old here. I owned all three of those books, bought them from a scholastic book order back in the fifth grade. It was ALWAYS, always the pictures that made those stories so scary. The one you used of that girl with nothing in her eye-sockets was the worst one of all three books. Everyone begged me to read them…

Ah, well that shows you how many romances I’ve read. :)

Do the estates of the original authors ever get involved?