Imagine a time before instant communications, where you have no idea how life has treated the recipient since you last saw them and it might take months for your letter to arrive. It is a sincere hope that they are well and that tradgedy has not befallen them.
It would be neurotic and unreasonable if your last update on their life was only days or even hours before, but in the days of letters hope is really all you had. It's just honest.
To be fair, I'm certain that someone has written it with that as the intended meaning. It seems like the kind of passive aggressive thing some mannered British aristocrat would do.
It has it's roots in actual letter writing, as in "I hope this letter finds you well".
I can't remember the last time I got a spam email honestly. I changed my address like 5+ years ago and it just stopped and never resumed. It's not the email provider filtering them either, the only thing it catches are legitimate but automated messages.
Starship Troopers is Heinlein not Dick, and it's fascist nonsense. Verhoeven was right to throw the book in the bin after two chapters and the movie rules.
Young gamers don't know the pain of a BSOD and the interminable wait getting back into game on an IDE hard drive. Even a CTD was a nightmare.
This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games-
Yeah, no, maybe the fact that you had to immediately jump to indie games should have been a hint that it's not a small part.
The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you're talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don't have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).
My real point of "it was better in the old days", is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It's everywhere, and it's not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It's fucking revolting and should be criminal.
As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it's so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I'll fall victim to this.
Never felt it in the first place, weekends always used to be stressful as a kid and it took a long time for them not to turn me into an anxious mess.
As a non-American who didn't grow up with imperial, I still prefer it for fantasy. Metric sounds too modern and scientific. Also I feel like I have more room to fudge distances because it already sounds imprecise.
Would be a fun bit to make the players use metric in a magitech world though.
I have used a check. I'm more likely to be able to get a mortgage and buy a house than to be accepted for a rental again, though I'll likely die before paying it off. I still keep a fair amount of actual cash at home "just in case".
Will be interested to hear your guesses.