cam_i_am

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Definitely. Plus, these early romantic relationships are actually really important for learning healthy behaviours and learning to spot unhealthy ones.

It's crucial that they all learn about consent, and understand that this was not ok.

We've moved past mere tolerance. Lactose inclusion. Lactose pride. Lactose celebration.

We often used to get video games for Christmas, but wouldn't be allowed to play them straight away because we were spending quality time with family etc. Then we'd get up early on the 26th and pack the car to go on a 2 week camping trip, still not having played our precious new game.

We would take the instruction manual with us on the trip and spend those 2 weeks intensely studying the controls, the lore, everything. By the time we returned home we were fucking ready.

Yes that's true. There may also be issues just with getting money out of the country to make the required payments to the storage providers. Either due to local restrictions or international sanctions.

If this is a real problem you have, and not just a thought experiment, I think rather than burying the data on some unreliable medium, your best bet is to just pay someone to store it for you offshore, away from the dictatorship you mentioned.

There are plenty of consumer-grade cloud storage services. I'm sure there are more niche ones specifically for long-term archival as well, which would usually be cheaper per bit, per-year, if you don't need to access the data regularly.

Prepare to welcome back Dungeons and Dragons Dragonshard, an RTS and RPG hybrid, and Forgotten Realms Demon Stone, a third-person action game.

Saved you a click.

It's great! You're also supporting the local scene which is massively important.

Gigs. Either just buying tickets to random local venues. Our go see your favourite artists live, but make sure you get there early enough to see the openers.

I've discovered so many amazing bands because they opened for bands I already knew I liked.

If you can't physically get to gigs then you can even just look up who your favourite artists are touring with, that will give you a pretty good sense of them being similar.

Rules and leaders don't have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.

Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.

Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men's sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.

Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.

Community.

They're all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.