Life, uh, finds a way.

Having played other MMOs does not make you qualified to have an opinion on a game you’ve never played. FFXI does have a grind, but it is unlike any other MMO out there. The intensity of trying to time your weapon skills and magic to land at exactly the right time, the dance-like coordination with your teammates, the variety of enemy strengths and weaknesses, learning a basic programming language to write macros and having them work flawlessly in a pinch - everything about it is exciting and you have to be at the top of your game to succeed. Every single mob fight feels like a boss battle and every kill is a win. Top that with some of the best writing of any Final Fantasy game and it’s a winning combination and technical marval that I cannot believe was achieved in 2003.

You may as well be saying that Dark Souls is nothing but a grind, but you’re missing that the grind is the fun part.

You clearly have not played FFXI.

Hop on HorizonXI! It’s a very populated classic server.

Final Fantasy XI. It’s been online for over 20 years and still has a devoted player base. The game’s scale is so epic that many people still haven’t beaten the expansions.

When it came out it was so far beyond what we had seen in an MMO before - The only competitors were UO and Everquest, but the graphics, music, complexity, and storyline were miles beyond those games.

It’s a game with unimaginable depth of play that takes years to master - not like the hand-holdy easy games we get nowadays. Truly a gem the likes of which we will never see again.

I met Moot at Otakon 2007 and he was kind of a dick. But here’s a fun bit of 4chan lore - When asked why he named it 4chan, he said that he wanted an English version of 2chan, and 4chan sounded cool because it was pronounced like “fortune”. Thus the logo is a 4 leaf clover, for good fortune.

I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere online, so I wonder if he was just making a joke.

I know you meant that this could escalate to a long war that your child may eventually be drafted into, but my initial mental image was a battalion of toddlers each carrying a Fisher Price branded “Baby’s First Assault Rifle”.

When I was living in a car I’d wardrive nightly to find Wifi. This was before Wifi was commonly available in public spaces, and household routers often used a default password or no password at all. I’d use it to pirate games and movies to keep myself entertained.

Later I moved into a 4 plex apartment and convinced the neighbors to share one Internet connection. We ran ethernet through walls and across the roof and split the bill.

You really shouldn’t use your debit card for anything other than withdrawing money at an ATM. Credit cards are safer plus you get rewards.

A House-like TV show about troubleshooting computer issues would be absolutely fascinating to me and a dozen other people. All along you thought it must be drivers but it turns out that the exact RGB configuration used on the case fans combined with the anime waifu wallpaper caused a slight over-voltage on a RAM chip resulting in game crashes and only Hackerman was brilliant enough to see it.

Yatta and the related flash animation comes to mind. There was a period in the mid 2000s where every anime con had a group of buff nearly naked guys wearing nothing but a leaf as tribute.

Yep you got it. So for people with only minimal vision issues it might not be worth it, but for those with severe vision problems it may be worth the risk even though their vision likely will degrade slowly back to their original prescription.

The sample size of that study was only ~300 people. A study with 20,000 participants in Singapore found that 90% of patients had 20/40 or higher vision after 10 years. It found that high-myopia (-14+)(the most extreme form of near sightedness) patients had a much higher rate of regression, with 39% of those patients losing 2 points or more from their vision within 10 years of tratment (and likely choosing to wear glasses [not listed in the study] or get retreatment [27%]).

So basically, if you have extreme vision problems before LASIK you’re much more likely to have to wear glasses again down the road.

Also, worth pointing out that almost everyone will need reading glasses as they age regardless of LASIK. This conversation only surrounds glasses for near sightedness.

Two years, and I had to wear headgear. Not sure if that’s still a thing, but it was a big metal contraption that went around your whole head. The pain was unbearable and I had no social life from how weird it looked.

That sounds absolutely amazing. Adding it to my reading list.

Rereading Ender’s Game. I had first read it when camping years ago and somehow misplaced it when I was 5 pages from the end of the book. I was so salty about it that I never picked up another copy to finish it until now.

I think it’s good that I waited because the political B plot hits home with the state of the world today.

Edit: I finished the book tonight. I was not prepared for that kind of trauma.

The title is intriguing. What’s it like?

That would contradict Rule 30.

Idk man, air conditioning is pretty nice.

Traveling to hang out with my old college besties, then a pride festival