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.)

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?

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

Do the estates of the original authors ever get involved?

I suppose because of volume. There is an ocean of romance novels out there. I’ve heard that a lot of romance readers are insatiable, like three novels a week. I took a course in women’s literature while in university and romance was a component of it. The prof said the romance industry cranks those books out like…

I understand that. I’ve just alaways wondered how it doesn’t happen in the traditional romance publishing model. I mean, those stories are pretty formulaic to begin with. I know I’m a bit off-topic here.

I remember our abnormal psychology teacher talking about this, and he marveled at the skill of the mesoamerican’s ability to do this successfuly. he talked about how they used flint tools to perform it, and how flint can hold a much sharper edge than metal, though it has the disadvantage of not being able to be…