I get what you’re saying and I’ve found that people have a diverse experience when it comes to their parents, so there are a lot of people who can’t relate. However, I have a similar relationship to you with mine and it took having children to realize how alien my parents are.

All of my kids are curious and show talent in things that are completely outside my experience or interest, but I make a conscious effort to learn about those things because it’s important to me to support them. That wasn’t something I experienced as a kid. In defense of my parents, I have more opportunity to exploring my kid’s interests, but it really doesn’t take much.

I’ll give you an example: I was a good kid growing up and did well in school but my parents mostly ignored me. I liked playing video games but my parents, especially my father, thought it was a waste of time. One day we were out though and he happened to see a demo of one of the Mortal Kombat games and he is a big fan of old martial arts movies. He bought the game for me and we went home and played it for a couple hours. That was over 30 years ago and I still remember who he played and the stages. I was so excited I remember he kept asking me to sit down because I was so elated that we had this thing in common. He never played video games with me before or after but I remember how excited I was that I thought I could do something my dad wanted to do.

It really instilled in me how important it is to meet you kids where they are instead of requiring them to come to you. I can’t say why your (or my) parents didn’t, but I can tell you there isn’t anything wrong with you and if you choose to have children, it is really satisfying to see them light up when you engage with their talents.

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.

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.

I was at a bar with a friend years ago and he kept talking about how much he loves limes. He went on and on about it. Finally, I told him I would bet him $50 if he could eat a whole lime, rind and all. He couldn’t refuse after spending 10 minutes talking about his love for them. The bartender was happy to offer a large one for the challenge.

This kid tried for 45 minutes to consume the lime. The juicy interior was quickly consumed and all that was left was the bitter, leathery peel which had the surface area of a dessert plate. He was chewing on it like he was trying to get someone to guess “chewing” in charades. He, very begrudgingly admitted defeat while me and the bartender were breathlessly laughing.