I watched it for the first time in the last year as someone who is largely anime naive. The mystery/mystical aspect of the narrative was the most intriguing part of the experience for me. I tend to enjoy genre-bending so the idea of using a battle mech anime as the vehicle to tell a character driven story appealed to me. However, I found many of the characters pretty difficult to accept.

Overall it was enjoyable but it’s not as special to me as I feel it is to others. I’m sure it’s because I am approaching it 30 years later and without an appreciation for the genre, but I don’t regret it. I’ll make the perhaps inappropriate comparison to Doki Doki Literature Club for someone who’s not familiar with the dating sim games.

I never understood why Breath of the Wild was so beloved. I played through it and Tears of the Kingdom, but I really wonder if they would have been as well received if they didn’t benefit from the Zelda franchise.

I found myself getting annoyed with the game more often than excited. I very quickly became annoyed encountering koroks, or shrines, or the stupid sign guy. I think the bevy of side quests and collectibles diluted too much of the narrative and enjoyment of the world.

Don’t put anything in your mouth you didn’t bring yourself.

Including coworkers.

Not me but my brother although I was involved.

It was ~2003 and I had spent the summer working to get an eMachine to play Diablo II and Everquest on. My older brother would play on it while I was working, which I was fine with, but then would refuse to get off when I came home. One specific time he was being exceptionally annoying and I had a pack of chocolate covered pretzel rods in my hand I got from work and decided to retaliate. He was so immersed in the game he was leaning forward on the stool I used as a computer chair. You know how jeans will pucker out a bit when you’re sitting and leaning forward?

With the hand of a surgeon I gently slotted a single pretzel rod into the exposed crack of his ass. He didn’t notice at all. How? I have no idea to this day. I laid on my bed and waited for him to notice but 10 minutes passed as the chocolate melted and the pretzel rod integrated itself into my brother ass crack. Every time he moved it slid slightly further. At one point he re-positioned himself on the stool and I heard it break in half and, even then, he was completely unaware.

I started dying laughing because it was so absurd that he didn’t realize and at this point it wasn’t even visible. He asked me why I was laughing and I kept telling him “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He started demanding to know and eventually I said, “you have a chocolate covered pretzel in your ass.” He thought I was just being annoying and talking nonsense but I just kept repeating it between bouts of laughter.


Eventually he got so mad he stood up and I saw the grim realization hit him that he did, indeed, have a chocolate covered pretzel in his ass crack. He was immediately irate and went to chase me but as very few people know it is hard to run with a chocolate covered pretzel slotted like a credit card between your ass cheeks. He yelled for my parents who both ran into the room and I got to see him try and tell them that I had put a chocolate covered pretzel into his ass crack and then them ask the obvious question, “how does someone do that and not realize?”


He had no answers. He had only his impotent rage and a chocolate covered pretzel in his ass crack. I had my computer back and was later beaten, but I knew I had struck a devastating psychological blow that still exists to this day.

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Ask not for whom the Vengabus comes, for it comes for thee.

I was in 5th grade during George W. Bush’s stint as governor of Texas in the 90s. He did a bunch of “education reform” there that was the predecessor of the No Child Left Behind Act he championed as President. I was in a relatively good school but despite that, we were learning about nouns and verbs for the first time that year.

The teacher was an idiot and we would get dozens of worksheets that covered the same topic. For the nouns and verbs section, we would read through a paragraph and had to write all the nouns in one column and all the verbs in the other column. When the test came, it was the same as the worksheets but the teacher changed the columns to verb/noun, which I didn’t read and I got a 0 for the test.

I went to the teacher and told her that it was an honest mistake and showed her how I aced all the other assignments, so I obviously understood the concept. She was insistent though that I got a zero despite that. However, because of the new Bush educational policies, students had the right to retake any assignment for the minimum passing grade.


So I asked her to retake the test, she said ok, and I crossed out Noun and wrote Verb and and same to Verb to Noun and handed it back. She immediately wrote another large zero on the page because I couldn’t change that part and I lost recess privileges for the rest of the week for being “rude”.

Revenge came though several weeks later when she was hanging black plastic sheeting on the suspended ceiling to create a makeshift planetarium in corner of the room. She was on a tall ladder and when she was putting up the last sheet, she lost her balance and fell through the sheeting and off the ladder and broke her arm. She was crying out for someone to help her but me and the other kids just let her struggle for a few minutes before she freed herself by tearing through the plastic sheet like Ace Ventura escaping from the rhino, crying.

The Wheel of Time series has 13.1 books in it with each being between 25-40+ hours. I listened to the entire series which was ~450 hours or about 19 days.

I remember going to the library when I was 10 and asking the librarian to help me find a book that was similar to the Redwall series. She cheerfully handed me Watership Down and told me it was very similar because it had anthropomorphic animals in it.

It’s like going to Walmart and saying you like Nerf and they suggest a glock.

In my anecdotal experience, people tend to engage with conspiracies either out of entertainment or a need to project order on a chaotic environment. The former really isn’t applicable to healthcare, but the latter very much is.

Simply accessing healthcare in the US is stressful and time consuming on top of the prohibitive cost. Additionally, receiving care can be painful, traumatic, and confusing. All of these negative emotions paired with low health literacy creates an environment ripe fabricating easy to comprehend theories about how healthcare works as a way to alleviate the confusion and thus bring comfort.

I think the current state of US healthcare, insofar as it creates the negative experience for patients, increases the attractiveness of conspiratorial ideas. However, my experience as a provider is that there is plenty of complexity and hardship surrounding providing care even if you remove all of the economic aspects. I’ve had patients who were fabulously wealthy with plenty of relevant education fall victim to fallacies because they are an attractive alternative to an uncomfortable truth.

Really big mouse cursor.

I don’t have sight issues at all, but you spend more time tracking the mouse than you think. And after less than a day the real estate it takes up doesn’t bother me.

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I 3d printed and painted this guy.

Yep, that’s the experience! 😂

Highly recommend checking out the Link to the Past Randomizer if you haven’t. It shuffles all the chest contents while ensuring you can complete the game. It’s different each time and even gives you a cheat sheet if you get stuck.

Check it out here

The Farseer trilogy is one of my favorite book series but that’s a fair assessment.

Agreed.

I had a friend recommend me Sword of Truth, which was, and is still, his second favorite book.

He just had a kid and named it Atlas after the Ayn Rand novel which is his first. I almost spit out my coffee when he told me that.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It’s long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.

I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.

My wife’s family was like that when I met them. Stomping around, chewing loudly, and TV super loud. When we moved in together, we got our hearing checked and it turned out she had a genetic issue that fused her stapen (hammer bone in the ear) into a fixed position which meant severe hearing impairment. Luckily a surgeon can replace the stapen with a titanium micro prosthesis that solves the problem.

Just after the procedure she called me downstairs because she said she was hearing weird noises and it turned out to be the refrigerator compressor she had never heard before. After both ears were completed, a lot of the loud behavior stopped.

I really think that some subset of these people just have hearing loss.