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.

deleted by creator

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.

I had to do a comparative religion project in secondary school. I completely forgot to do it, which was the custom at that time. It was Sunday at 7pm and I resolved to do the whole thing in less than an hour.
I searched through the garage and found a small compressed cardboard reindeer that was painted gold as a winter decoration. I used tin snips to remove the antlers and wrote a paragraph on the Golden Calf.

Most efficient B- I have ever received.

I bought my first one to do exactly that! The clip that held the spring in place to gently lower the door snapped twice and I saw that someone had a beefier one modeled and decided I would buy a printer rather than pay the $17 dollar for another part that would break.

My 3d printer(s). I bought my first one used for $100 ~10 years ago and offered to print a small model for someone’s college capstone project. People learned I had a printer and started coming to me for all sorts of small things. I would only charge for substantial jobs but people would end up paying me anyway. I quickly got a resin printer and started selling miniatures for friends. I eventually got contacted by one of the major manufacturers who would send me return units and replacement parts so I could repair and tell them what was broken, if anything, then I could keep or sell them.


Everything I have done with 3d printing has been subsidized by side jobs. It’s a super fun hobby because 3d printing sits at the nexus point of basically every other hobby. I have done jobs for people building rat rods, model trains, cosplay, interior designers, hydroponics, brewing, architects, drones, and more.

Don’t show JD Vance this

Rocco’s Modern Life

"In November 1992, two months before the production of season 1 of Rocko’s Modern Life, Murray’s [the shows creator] first wife committed suicide. Murray had often blamed his wife’s suicide on the show being picked up. He said, “It was always an awful connection because I look at Rocko as such a positive in my life.” He felt that he had emotional and physical “unresolved issues” when he moved to Los Angeles, describing the experience as participating in a “marathon with my pants around my ankles.”

Rocco’s Modern Life - wikipedia

For what it is worth, I took a constitutional law course in the latter part of Obama’s second term.

The professor spent a lot of time talking about the accretion of power to the executive branch and very clearly posited that it was a certainty that we would have an issue with authoritarianism in the near future. I remember sitting in class (naively) thinking he was overstating the problem.

Good news though, that same professor has made a lot of headway in eliminating qualified immunity in a few states.