if you want to get shit like "fangames made in the 2000s that come exclusively as a single windows exe" you have to get them from the kind of sites you'd vitriolically instruct your grandmother never to visit. anyone who was there for the early days, when we launched cave story with doukutsu.exe, is like a fucking bomb sniffing dog now. we can wander through minefields and miraculously exit unscathed. our noses tell us which pages install ransomware. our tails twitch when we look at the fake download button; our mouths water when we look at the real one.
it still absolutely obliterates me psychologically that a few years ago someone started sharing around a single file just called mario.exe, claiming it was mario fucking 64 but for the PC, and thousands of us just uncritically clicked on it and nothing bad happened.
we knew it was safe. our tails knew.
