I have to disagree.

Ready Player One the movie is a dumb 5/10 flick I can throw on my second monitor while I get stoned and play video games while looking over and going “hehe” every now and then as I LOOK AT popular things doing stuff.

Ready Player One the book is an infuriating grind where each scene starts with Wil Wheaton (the audiobook narrator) listing off names of popular things for a few minutes before the incel-adjacent main character reveals that he actually spent months practicing the one specific popular thing he needed to succeed right now.

It did prompt me to try Joust when I came across it at a barcade though, and that was fun.

… goddammit, it’s been 20 years and I never caught that.

Firewatch was a good game for me to get immersed in for an evening. It involves hiking around an isolated open world park. It follows a linear story which is pretty interesting, but I think there’s an option to wander freely after completion

Ohoho, if you enjoyed the first game the second will be a treat. I recently started replaying the first and was surprised at how janky the mechanics snd progression felt compared to the sequel. Enjoy!

They are great for cheap cards though. I only go there when Mother’s Day or someone’s birthday is coming up.

Driving straight through a stoplight from the right turn lane. There’s this intersection where I live that looks like this:

Most people going straight through that intersection want to take the exit right after to hop on a freeway. Twice now I’ve dealt with people following the red line from the right turn lane, forcing everyone else to merge around them to take the exit.

I see what you’re saying and I know you didn’t ask for advice, but putting “rugged” and “brave” in quotation marks could have conveyed that patronization.

A couple years ago I was moving my dad cross country back to the city where our family lives because my stepmom was separating from him after a couple years of his heavy alcoholism. When I got there he had been drinking again so I had to call my uncle to fly over last minute so he could drive the uhaul and I could drive my dad’s car with him in it.

Just past Louisville on the way to Indianapolis he said he was feeling funny and seeing light. I was a little concerned and I don’t remember what I said, I just remember him saying “okay, I trust you.” A minute later he looked at the corner of the car, said “oh my water,” while reaching for a cup that wasn’t there, and his seizure started. I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t immediately pull over to the shoulder, instead I sped up to get ahead of my uncle and take the next exit. My dad was already secured in place by his seatbelt, but it seemed like he choking on something, so I had to bang his chest with my fist a couple times while yelling “breathe dammit!” That worked, but he wasn’t conscious.

I pulled over, got in a travel center parking lot right next to the exit, felt lucky because I saw the uhaul pulling in behind me, and ran around to get at him. He started to come to and I dredged up my one first aid class from high school to check his memory/mental state. He could answer my general questions about the current year, president, etc. but then he looked around and asked why his dog and my uncle were there as they got out of the now parked uhaul. It appeared that his memory of the past couple days was messed up. I called my stepmom and she said that sort of thing had happened before.

I guess he hadn’t gone to a hospital after his withdrawal seizures in the past so we decided to continue to Indianapolis, monitor him, and go to a hospital there if something more happened. I was very disconcerted by his lack of memory for the last couple days, but like half an hour later he referred to something recent and after asking his recollection had returned at least to some degree.

There weren’t any other health issues beyond him feeling like shit, so we were able to make it the rest of the way home the next day after crashing at a hotel.

Yeah, that crossed my mind, but I do think there’s a difference. US corporations shoot themselves in the foot to pursue short term profits because the people in charge believe they can get out of the business with that profit before those decisions come back to bite them.

In the show though, they’re doing the opposite. They’re giving up their short term profitable corporations for some nebulous future “market monopolization” in the long term, despite there no longer being a market for them to monopolize. I think that makes them even more stupid.

This is semi-related so spoilers for the Fallout show: this right here is the reason I stopped being invested in the plot of Fallout. When they revealed that Vault Tec dropped the bombs that created the post apocalyptic setting I was dumbfounded. I can accept silliness and characters being nonsensical sometimes, but in that moment every person in that room was proven to be outright stupid. They tried to say that it would let them “corner the market” in the aftermath, but how could they not see that they were destroying their own marketshare too?

Here are some thoughts based on past reflections I’ve had (so they might not be phrased the best) in no particular order:

First, you mentioned sometimes not understanding what is being said. I minored in philosophy during college, and the first and most important thing I was taught during Intro was the principle of charity during discussion, composed of two parts. The first, assume the other person has something worth saying, isn’t super relevant here. But the second part is that questions of meaning come before questions of truth. If you can repeat back what the other person tells you in your own words and have them agree, then you can start forming a rebuttal.

Speaking of forming things, I believe that the thoughts you express are not your thoughts, but a linguistic representation of your thoughts. When I envision a thought forming, it’s more like a glowing ball of thought and words can be put together to form a kind of shell around the thought. The better the wording, the closer the shell gets to matching the shape of the thought itself. Improving your English toolset will allow you to better shape your words to match your thoughts more quickly and easily. The primary way to do this is to expand your vocabulary/lexicon/internal thesaurus and ability to connect words together, and the primary method to accomplish that is to expose yourself to new words in new orders, and you do that by reading new stuff.

All that is just the prep work. In an actual conversation you don’t have the luxury of reading a bunch right now. My advice there is that, if the other people are cool, be upfront that you are still formulating your thoughts into words and ask for help in finding the right ones if your struggling. Doing so will leave less space in the minds of others to assume anything else, likely leading to not just more patience from them but possibly help for you as well.

I think the process of forming thoughts into words is one of the most fascinating things there is. The times when I have observed myself pulling an original thought out of the ether of my mind or better yet being able to help someone else in pulling their thoughts out of their head and into the world are some of the most beautiful moments I have experienced. I wish you well in working on your ability to find those moments!

Close to my rarest, but very fun and surprisingly strong! From Victoria 3

How’s that quote go? “There’s a growing sentiment in the US that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Navigation, easily. I can learn a few basic phrases of a language, and odds are someone will speak English in the places I’m going. I can ask English-speaking people what the essential customs and etiquette are.

But if I don’t know where I’m going, I can’t be confident in what I’m doing. If I’m in a new place and have to follow a narrow set of directions to get to specific places, I’m confined to those narrow spaces. Knowing where I am and what’s around me opens up the world with me driving the experience instead of relying on the knowledge of others.

In both of the cities I’ve lived in, I hear a place mentioned and I instantly can point in its direction, estimate the distance, and calculate a good route to get close to there. At the music festival I’ve attended several times with a large venue I am the guy that people stop and ask for directions because I exude confidence in where I am. To be able to carry that knowledge with me anywhere in the world would be incredible.

And if “understanding the streets” includes knowing good restaurants or places to visit and whether a tourist would be welcome there, then all the better.

I’m rarely certain enough to claim that I’m right. Oftentimes I’ll acknowledge that uncertainty by stating where/when I heard something so the other person can judge the validity of that source themself.

That said, if I am confident in something and I’m told that I’m wrong, I’ll usually look it up there or just say something like “that’s not my understanding but I can’t dive into it now.” Then when I do have time I’ll do a bit of research, or if the topic comes up again I’ll assert what I was confident in with the caveat that so-and-so told me this other thing.

If I do the research and find that I was wrong, I’ll try to remember that the next time I see the other person and let them know I confirmed they were right.

This post and the comment from Lupus helped me a lot when my dad passed away: https://lemmy.world/post/22499928?sort=Top

My own advice is to do what feels right if you can. As my emotions cascaded over me when the doctor told us he was gone, one image went through my head. I saw myself throwing a rock into the lake my grandparents had a cabin on when I was growing up, from the boat landing my dad would walk to with my brother and me to skip rocks. So a day or two later my brother and I drove back to the lake, trespassed around the old cabin to soak in the memories, then skipped rocks for a while. I still suck at skipping rocks, and it didn’t fix things, but it was a little cathartic.

My dad was an organ donor when his brain died. The next day after the 24 hour period to confirm brain death, I was sitting with my brother and stepmother waiting to have the plug pulled when a lady walked into the room and introduced herself “as part of my father’s care team.” I don’t remember much of what she said because I was focused on waiting for the end and she wasn’t wearing scrubs so I didn’t really care what she had to say, but she left and after another couple hours I learned that she was from the Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) for our State, my dad was a donor, and they weren’t pulling the plug until they took him to a different hospital for organ harvesting.

The rest of that day was a blur but my stepmom was pissed, the next morning my dad’s body was in the same room, that lady was apparently fired, there was a new guy and gal as well as their boss to talk with us, they told us they weren’t going away. Eventually they agreed to perform the harvesting surgery there so we could walk to the OR with him. We were asked if we wanted a “hero walk” where the nurses and doctors take time away from actually helping people to clap for a corpse being walked down the hall, which was the dumbest fucking thing I’d ever heard of.

I wasn’t there when my dad’s brain died in the middle of the night. I thought I’d be there as his body functions shut down over the course of a half hour, but instead the last I saw of him before he was cremated was his still breathing corpse being pushed down a hallway. I got a text that his heart had stopped a couple hours later.

Across North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin there are only something like 350 organ donations a year because the body needs to be either very fresh and preserved or brain dead to keep the organs intact for harvesting. If you are a donor, it is very unlikely that your organs will actually be donated, but if they are, it can add a whole extra layer of shitty to an already awful situation for the family. Obviously this is just my experience and it’s probably unusual for people to be fired so it was probably an especially bad one, but you asked and this is my answer to your question. I’m still not sure if I’m going to be a donor next time I renew my license. I don’t think I will until I add a stipulation to my will to allow my family to override it if they feel a need to.

If you know your exit is coming up from memory why would you not already be in the correct lane? You’ve learned the route, you should be able to recognize when an exit is getting close. My concern with a gps is that it’s easy to get caught up in keeping track of traffic immediately around you, then get surprised when the gps says to take the next exit in half a mile because you didn’t know the road well enough to recognize the buildings/markers that it’s getting close, and you have gps so why bother looking at the actual signs.

If taking the next exit is an issue because it might take a while, then how does a gps figure out a shorter route? It’s literally the next exit, there is nowhere else to go before that exit, and if it’s taken a while to get there then the main road is almost certainly the fastest route back.

If I’m going somewhere for the first time in a while I will often check the gps before I leave to see if there’s construction or road closures because it can be helpful, but once I’ve confirmed there isn’t I close the gps and run off memory. One time a couple months ago I was driving down the freeway in the boonies and construction closed down a chunk of it. I started following the detour and got out of cell service range. Eventually there was another detour sign that directed my back toward the main road after the construction area. It was very helpful and also the norm when there is construction or events taking place, at least in my neck of the US.

I think gps can be a useful tool in the short term or to learn routes, but when I start talking about driving westbound on one of the largest freeways in the metro or point “that way” and my friend gives me a dull look because all they know is “turn left here” and “exit here,” it’s become a crutch. But I almost definitely put a higher value on knowing where I am and how to navigate than the average person does, and I don’t expect that to change, so it’s something I’ve come to (begrudgingly) accept.

The Xbox 360 release of PvZ is the most feature complete version. It has the zen garden, the mini games, and a co-op mode where you and a friend each control a cursor to go around planting and digging while sharing resources. You can also butter the zombies to buy a little more time. It’s a great deal of fun and I don’t know that any other version has the co-op. I may have my physical copy floating around somewhere but I bought it digitally for my Xbox One since it’s backwards compatible.

I still have mine. It’s my splitscreen Halo and Plants vs Zombies coop machine!