Baseball went into relative decline during the Dark Ages due to a shortage of playing time. Numerous wooden mechanical pitching machines that had been used in batting practice were requisitioned for military use in storming castles. Nevertheless, this dull era produced one bright moment: the invention of the balk. Under this new rule, if the pitcher balks, the runner on first is awarded second base. Then, according to custom, the runner takes it home and carefully mounts it on his living room wall.

Anthony D'Amato, The Contribution of the Infield Fly Rule to Western Civilization (and Vice Versa), 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 189, 194 (2006)

top 10 video game merchants that i can think of off the top of my head:

10

9 red animal crossing I've literally never persisted long enough in an animal crossing to interact with this guy but he's a sneaky little fox

8 the vending machines from bioshock. i love to hear unintelligible noises constantly

7 rouxls kaard i swear to god he has a shop in one of them

6 eevee in pokopia when she sets up her little stall and i buy all her useless items because i love her and want her to succeed in business

5 the ethereals from world of warcraft I'm cheating again i think but like they are mostly relegated to vendor roles and they are empirically the best characters in the game

4 Valerie monster prom i just like her i like her vibe she effortlessly gives off the air of i can read you like a book and i find you mildly amusing and that's what i like in a girl Anyway what was i taking about

3 stan monkey island sort of not really technically but has merchant vibes if monkey island was a roguelike he'd be selling you semi permanent upgrades

8 the spiv from medievil 2 I'm still thinking about them years after playing the game. they are perpetually remaking medievil 1 but never medievil 2

2 Shakra Silksong she is my girlfriend i am keeping a permanent save game with her in greymoor so i can go and sit with her whenever i like

1 the stranger from resident evil 4 i mean obviously

on sharing one's opinons

dark timeline: manosphere emu egg trend leads to new mainstream egg laying fetish as tiktok overwatchface model girls start roleplaying as having laid the egg the men are about to eat to encourage them to get their nutrients leading to an upward trend in yoshi kirigumis as niche sexual paraphernalia and a new character added to whatever hero shooter or moba is most desperate for new money at the time thats like sexy velociraptor themed with wide birthing hips and the manosphere gets over the emu egg trend when people start making gratuitous high fidelity SFM animations of that character laying eggs as it has now been deemed Gooner Shit to eat emu eggs causing emu farmers dealing with a sudden financial fallout and having to lean into that side of the appeal resulting in a new disgusting egg flavored gamer supps flavor featuring a leggy emu gijinka girl and people arguing online about whose waifu would have the better tasting eggs. Someone on twitter/bluesky/4chan makes a new "dinomama-chan" character who follows in a similar niche to the aforementioned raptor girl but with conventionally attractive young looking anime milf aesthetic who has a deadbeat NEET son who plays video games all day that she makes dino nuggies for as well as scrambled eggs made from her own eggs with all the expected sexual tension. The telephone game leads to trans girls getting better about eating breakfast and lunch by making themselves egg meals and imagining it came out of dinomama's cloaca making the original creator fabulously rich from plushie sales (not from makeship but the other one that lets you sell the plushies with sexualized designs I forgot the name) Hardly any of this is able to let emu farmers financially recover from the loss of sales due to the beginning trend raising the prices to being even more prohibitively expensive causing a politician whose really behind on the internet and culture who still thinks emu eggs give you big dick balls man milk energy lobbying to subsidize the emu farmers and going on hundreds of podcasts resulting in one of them eventually showing him AI generated oviposition porn on their phone making him think lizard people are real and hiding in our midst but like in a Super Mario Bros (1993) way causing another telephone game on bluesky and tumblr that jacking it to dinomama or owning dinomama plushies makes you antisemitic and the premier oviposition and lizardgirl fetish blog on tumblr gets nuked by staff after being mass-reported resulting in edgy transfeminist kinksters adopting an aesthetic around Riptor's cheerleader costume from the 2013 reboot of Killer Instinct in retaliation

ALT

let's boil uncle in water to reduce his essence into a tincture

people act like this college shit is hard but i used AI to generate me a medical license and have bee ndoing surgery on newborns for 6 months