Yes, when a character gets a Magical Girlfriend, "I'm not worthy of you!" is one of the most common reactions.

Yes, I got the reference.

It just doesn't seem to be worth commenting on, as it's so tangential to the actual point of the post.

Incidentally, which is better, for the losers in the mating game:

A non-sentient lover, or involuntary celibacy?

I object to the term "catgirl" for "nonsentient romantic/sex partner". A catgirl is every bit as sentient as Captain Picard. The word you want is "fembot".

My soul got sucked out a long time ago.

[whine] I wanna be a wirehead! Forget eudamonia, I just wanna feel good all the time and not worry about anything! [/whine]

AI in strategy games universally ignores fog of war, so there's not even fun of using that as a cover.

Not quite true; Advance Wars: Days of Ruin has the AI dutifully obey the Fog of War limitations. However, the AI is pretty easy to beat anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Stranger in a Strange Land may have been an attempt to describe a Weirdtopia.

Heh. A GameFAQs-style FAQ/Walkthrough for real life. What should I do with something like that?

Well, I actually am pretty much stuck right now, so the first thing I do is get myself out of my current jam (regarding employment and finances and such). Then I see if there is any section that covers vague general advice that seems relatively safe, and read that. Finally, I go lock it away in a safe deposit box at a bank and try to avoid using it again except in an emergency.

Taking the analogy a little too far, my game player ethics tells me that I should avoid looking up, say, future stock market returns or winning lottery numbers, because that would be cheating. Ideally, I'd simply want to use it to avoid blunders rather than to munchkin my way through all of life's puzzles and quests. (Did I just verb "munchkin"?)

On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to ctrl-F "cure for cancer" simply because, well, some things are worth doing a little cheating for. (Is there anything one can do in the physical world that could count as an exploit? Heck, if anything can be an exploit, the human brain sure seems like one, considering that humans have literally taken over the world in what, on the time scale of evolution, is like the blink of an eye.)

postulating that talking about science in public is socially unacceptable, for the same reason that you don't tell someone aiming to see a movie whether the hero dies at the end. ... I started thinking that, well, maybe it really would be a good idea to get rid of all the textbooks, all they do is take the fun out of science.

Maybe they should exist, but shouldn't be thought of and written like textbooks. Maybe they should be like video game walkthroughs. You use them when you're stuck, as a last resort. Or, you just go dive right in, because you want to play optimally and make sure that you explore everything.

Of course, it's kind of hard to make learning many sciences into an experience that is like exploring a video game, because most people don't have the equipment on hand to, say, recreate the experiment that led Rutherford to hypothesize the existence of the atomic nucleus. On the other hand, you could make mathematics into a much more game-like experience, by simply presenting progressively harder problems and challenging students to come up with methods to solve them.

You may or may not be aware that mathematics in the Middle Ages was a highly competitive endeavor, with new problem-solving techniques, such as the general solution to the cubic equation, being carefully guarded trade secrets that mathematicians would use to challenge and one-up one another other.

The "corny pun" in this case being "Bayesian Conspiracy"?