Solution: don't own beasts. Life becomes considerably easier (not to mention cleaner!).
Not owning dogs has been considerably useful. My cats generally understand the desk is not for them.
I agree that people who are unable or unwilling to exercise a modicum of attentiveness can easily result in scratched discs.
Not having trolls (brothers) in the house means I am so much more careful with my stuff!!! Things are a lot less likely to get misplaced/broken.
I do miss having physical media to install games. Makes it easier to have single player games not tied to the internet, since things happen like power outages. Or the river floods and you lose internet for a week because the utility pole crashed the bridge.
But I do not miss having multiple disks to *play* the games. And the era of CDs meant games had the rare patch after the fact. You knew the game was more or less complete. I'm fine when I purposely decide to be part of early access, like with DOS1, DOS2, & BG3, but I would much rather see games held together with more than duct tape and prayers on release.
