I have a somewhat common word as my last name.

My first two initials are ‘al’, which means “to the” in Italian.

My email is [email protected]

I get Italian train ticket reservation info about twice a year.

My reading journey mirrors yours. When I entered the professional workforce, I was consistently met with vacant stares when I’d use whatever words I thought perfectly fit whatever I was describing. I came to find that using “big” words like that (examples I can recall: superfluous, inimical, vacuous, cogent, avuncular) made people think I was trying to show I was better than them. I had to pare my verbal vocabulary back to the most basic form so I could do my actual job.

Granted, I was in a “white collar” job surrounded by blue collar folks.

A room temperature can of full sugar soda takes at most 2 hours to chill in a 0 °F freezer. A refrigerated can of full sugar soda takes about 45 minutes to get to just above freezing (the perfect temperature for Dr Pepper consumption).

Diet sodas take about half the time in both scenarios.

This is for 12oz cans.

I’ve got it down to a science.

I beat breath of the wild solely because I was holding out hope that it somehow got good at some point.

The dungeons and boss fights were enjoyable. But there were only 4 of those and the rest of the game was sorely underwhelming.

Tears of the kingdom is the first Zelda game I didn’t care to finish in 30 years. I’ve even beat Zelda 2.

The main thing I remember about this game is that it was financed by the fortune of a former MLB baseball player, independent of any game studio.

I see this repeated all the time and I’m sure there’s some truth to it, but A&W burgers are also disgusting and more expensive than their competitors. So there’s that.

Madam Web. The premise of your perception being un-stuck in time and the ramifications that has for your psyche is really cool. What’s not cool is hiring bad writers and nepo baby actresses to portray that story

Death road to Canada is pretty solid.

Spelunkey 2 is fantastic, albeit incredibly challenging.

I made a point to play every game in my library a few years ago. Every game got 2 hours at a minimum (unless they didn’t work). Played some real gems like Torment: Tides of Numenera, Tyranny, and World of Goo.

A traveling repairman or some other on-the-road professional. Let it go in the hotel overnight and have your print by morning. Or that evening if you set it up in the morning.

Cranks and dials like the Tempest arcade cabinet and the more recent Playdate.

The Playdate almost nailed it.

You burning out is a process failure. Work normal hours and let shit fail 🤷‍♂️. Say the reduction in hours is “health related” so they can’t pry.

Go back 1000 years before Europe makes contact with the Americas. Infect everyone and let their populations get wiped out, but give time to recover so first contact with Europe doesn’t go as poorly. Also give them horses much earlier.

I can tell you haven’t booted the game up recently because they completely redid the perk system and cyberware not too long ago.

CDPR has been atoning for the sin that was their failed launch for years. In my opinion, the game is a good game now.

If I read this post without any context I would think “this guy is too poor to hire a black prostitute” and not " this guy doesn’t have a particle accelerator capable of making a miniature black hole"

Forgot about this one. I loved this phone back in the day. Remember when it would say DROID when you booted it up?

The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.

This is cool. I had no idea about most of these.

It costs ~$150 to build your own CO2 carbonation setup. After that, refills are pretty infrequent at ~$10. That gets you relatively unlimited sparkling water.

If you’re jonesing for specific flavors, flavor powders, extracts, and raw sucralose in bulk on Amazon will run you around $20, or ~$100 total for a decent assortment. It’ll pay for itself in like a year and the powders will last you awhile.

Depends on how you learn, and what the material is. Stuff that worked for me, in no particular order:

• Write a cheat sheet for exams, even if you can’t actually use it in the exam
• Start homework the day the lecture that covers the material is given in class.
• Try to explain the subject out loud to someone else (real or imaginary). Anywhere you draw a blank when talking is something you need to refresh on. Repeat this until you get it right.
• For memorization - heavy topics, build an Anki flashcard deck

All of these techniques are variations on the fact that people learn by repeated exposure. the closer together the initial repetitions are, the higher the retention.