I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.

Flat earthers don’t believe in a flat earth. What they actually believe is that Satan is fighting a war for the minds of people, and education is a tool of satan to lead you away from god. All other nonsense they spew stems from that— they don’t believe the earth is flat because evidence shows it, they find evidence to support the earth being flat because the education system, which they believe to be from Satan, tells you it’s spherical.

And most (but not all) flat earthers have moved on to the next conspiracy that supports their central belief (Satan is fighting a war for your mind) and don’t care much about flat earth anymore. Flat earth was never the point, not being swayed by Satan is always the center.

You’re being downvoted because there is contemporaneous historical evidence for their existence as people who existed and had a large following at the time, and in fact, as much or more evidence exists for them as exists for a lot of other historical figures. You can disbelieve claims about them, but it isn’t particularly rational to disbelieve they were actual people that attracted crowds. Likewise, it would be irrational to call Uri Geller a fictional character, even if its rational to disbelieve he had psychic powers.

Can’t you swap out DMEM for sports drinks anyway (with the Japanese brand Green Dakara being the best replacement)? That implies DMEM is basically a sports drink itself, if you think about it.

Because “mafia wars” makes consistent money, and the games people actually might want to play don’t. Slapping a new coat of paint on the same mechanics over and over again means getting the money maker out there to more people, just gotta lure em in with the promise of a game they might actually want to play, then swap in the game they don’t and hope you snag em with the psychological tricks before they leave.

It works just often enough to make it profitable and easy.

I think I’ve heard a Roman version before, but I’ve been utterly unable to find it again— everywhere has the Greek that I can find. I don’t care that it’s not the original, the Roman version is interesting in its own right.

The version I heard (but cannot find again! Argh!) had Medusa discovering the secrets of what amounts to shampoo, and being cursed by a goddess of beauty for daring to become as beautiful as said goddess, who was petty. So her beautiful (ie, washed) hair became snakes, and she was changed to be so ugly you turn to stone to look at her.

I’d love a tip to where I could find this version of the story again, or if the version I heard somewhere was even historical to begin with.

Yep, but he needed to push through legal and investor complaints, so rush rush rush, damn the risk. They’re “captains of industry”, they couldn’t possibly fail!