In my country court proceedings are secret, as their disclosure can harm ongoing investigations, or simply violate someone's constitutional right to privacy.
Accusations are not convictions. And even if you were convicted of something that's no one else's business. You pay your debt to society, you have the right to a clean slate. Never hear of the Right to be Forgotten laws?
If the US does not protect its I'm sure that one day it will get finally get rid of the media circus bullshit and let people have their dignity.
You're the record holders for bible-thumping, how about "Judge not lest ye be judged" etc.

What happened? Necromancy? I haven't heard of it in like 20 years.

They're throwing shit at us because they're bored and their AI is so inbred after several generations of consuming its ancestors' slop that it hallucinates frequently and so the asteroids miss Earth.

I think you just described humans. WE are the danger to this world, and provide no value to it :)

No one eats viruses but quite a lot of species depend on mosquitoes to survive, or eat the mosquito-eaters to survive.
You don't have to kill any mosquitoes, just replace them with a genetically modified version that is resistant to parasites?

Quite a lot of animals feed on insects, and then some carnivores might feed on them.
If you overfish sardines, anything bigger than a sardine may also suffer a population decline, as it is a staple food for lots of yummy fish and also marine mammals..

I keep hearing about miracle breakthroughs whenever researchers need money but they never go into production.

Nobody knows what Napster is, try buying Crunchyroll and turn it into a 3D experience.

Why would I need a cryptographic ledger thingamabob, whatever the hell that is, in order to buy and own an image? It's as if people didn't buy and sell images all the time, for instance in stock photos websites. Not that I am terribly fussed over a wallpaper image being used by someone else, legally or otherwise.
When will reality catch up with the cryptobros?

Ask them to generate text with ChatGPT and analyze each assertion, explaining why it's right or wrong based on the officially recommended reading material, with citations and accurate page numbers etc.
Use your own book or another one that is not entirely mainstream so GPT won't have heard of it.
Grade them on how well researched something is and on the quality of their critical thinking and argumentative skills. GPT will not usually give you multiple citations for the same thing.
Memorization is for USB pens, not people.
I use AI to generate code in my day to day job (I'm tacitly expected to use Copilot in order to be productive, that's why they're paying for it)

Depending on what you call influential, the only game that really made me think and learn about something was Civilization (the first one of course).
I even lifted some bits of Civilopedia for a school paper once. There was no Wikipedia back then ;)
Here are some things I am tempted to reflect upon:
- In Civilization nobody honors a peace treaty with you for very long. Today we discuss the same issue about Vladimir Putin or Russian history in general.
- Technology can revolutionize war (see the quick rise of advanced drones in Ukraine)
- Revolutions are crap, even if they result in a Democracy. 6 turns of Anarchy has parallels with real life. Better to have evolution than revolution.
- Irrigation really can change land a lot, these days we have farms that can grow food in the desert.
- Poor countries generally got a bad deal on their starting place.
- You really can pay money to incite revolts. See Putin's election interference etc.
- Trade is king. It seems that money can actually buy happiness for a lot of people and shit hits the fan when you're low on panem et circenses.

I can't see a damn thing on all these apps with tiny fonts, and I hung my big screen TV on the wall in front of my bed. And yeah I watch lots of Youtube videos on there. These days Youtube rewards creators who develop longer videos so there's actually lots of pretty interesting stuff, news, history documentaries, travel videos or even cooking.
Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has a show there.

SL is not VR though, more like a game engine where you can collaborate with people and see what they do using the included construction tools. Massively Multiplayer Online Blender, for Dummies. There is an OpenSim project where you can get a server for free and experiment with this "3D streaming" technology. It is quite an achievement in distributed physics simulation, You can fly around with things attached and they will have scripts inside them, which run seamlessly as you cross from server to server, and even have a ball roll down a mountain on a terrain that is mapped to a grid of multiple servers. It uses Havok for physics. If you consider this was running on 2003 hardware it was quite the breakthrough.

I started developing 3D content professionally in 2004 about a year after joining Second Life and we called ourselves "metaverse developers" back then. My company made $500k in 2007 at the peak of the hype cycle and petered out with the subprime crisis. I also founded the SL wiki, later hosted by wikia, now fandom.
https://www.secondlife.com/
https://secondlife.fandom.com/...
https://betatechnologies.info/

We already complained about "bells and whistles" / bloatware in the 90s.
Remember Clippy? Every release of Office was more complex than the last one. And other productivity software outside the Microsoft sphere also kept getting nore obnoxious. As far back as the move from CorelDraw 2 to CorelDraw 3 I have heard people complain about increasing complexity and that was 1991-92.