Valen

• Jim’s Big Ego
• Rockapella

We have a code for when we’re ready to leave a party. One of us will go to the other and do the finger walking up the other’s arm. This means “I want to go home.”

Is it worth the money? You’re going to spend something like 1/3 of your time on it. Make it a good one.

Ahh, WordStar. That was a great editor. Keep in mind, at the time the control key on keyboards was where the caps lock key is now, and there weren’t arrow keys. So the left hand moved the cursor up/down/left/right by characters, words, or screens very easily. Once you used it for a while, it became second nature.

It was easier to write text in WordStar than in vi. That was a hard transition. But WordPerfect was a truly opaque piece of software until you had the ubiquitous templates for the function keys.

Messed up Hawkeye too.

I find Wikipedia invaluable. I’ve been donating $5/month for a number of years now.

I’ll give you two suggestions at opposite ends of the spectrum:

• Neon Genesis Evangelion is a wonderful show. It starts out as a giant robot series, but then moves in on examining how the characters are broken mentally (as in, they’re already broken, not let’s break stable people). Does have a tendency to depress people, but they generally feel it was a good experience.
• Just about any Studio Ghibli movie. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle. Some of these are more kids movies, but adults love them. Others have more adult themes. Stick to the ones directed by Hayao Miazaki. Warning: Grave of the Fireflys will make you cry and leave you devastated.

It’s unusual to have pet rats. Most vets do cats and dogs, and anything else is an afterthought. While there are many vets within 5 miles of me (suburbia), we have to travel over 30 miles to get to a good rat vet. Vets for farmers know more animals, but I wouldn’t expect them to know rats very well.

One time when one of ours got an X-ray, the doctor was comparing to a photo in a large book of X-rays for various animals. I expect that’s an expensive book to buy.

I’m so sorry to hear of your loss 😭. I’m glad that they had a good home and loving family.

Pet rats are awesome! They’re domesticated and used to interacting with people. They have distinct personalities and are very loving. Sadly, they only live about 2.5 to 3 years.

The opening of Cowboy Beebop: Tank.

Looks like it’s strictly one server. Too bad I can’t connect to multiple servers and switch between them.

PC: Descent. Full 6 degrees of freedom movement. Fantastic.

The opening song to Neon Genesis Evangelion. A Cruel Angel’s Thesis.

My first wife would get this thing about every 3 years or so where a contact would migrate around to the back of her eye. This would then be followed by about an hour of her trying to get it back front-and-center. Just the thought of it is enough to horrify me.

I have over the glasses sunglasses. Yes, they’re big and dorky. My son says they look like the glasses in the TV room from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I don’t care. I’m retired (so am an annoying old person)

I don’t care which password manager you use, as long as you use one (and it’s secure). It’s such a game changer.

What I actually want is to be able to pay Reddit or Google or whoever it is a fair amount of money, say the amount they’d make by showing me a reasonable number of ads, plus a bit more. Say 10% more. In exchange for making more money from me than they would with ads, they would let me use old.reddit.com, or a third party app and not show me any ads.

I get an ad free service, Reddit gets more money than they would have before.

I figure that the amount would be easily less than $10 per year.

They would have to show something like this: at the end of each month, they tell me that I consumed so much of Reddit. They would have shown an ad every 25 posts, at $0.0005 per ad impression. So my payment for the month will be $x.

I’ve heard about Reddit removing a mod from a popular subreddit, then turning the subreddit public (sorry, don’t have the reference). They can always stop the blackout by force. But once they do that, those mods will have definite incentive to start the communities in the fediverse.

My favorite long game (as in over a couple of hours) is Merchant of Venus. For shorter games I like Azul, Splendor, 7 Wonders Duel, That’s Pretty Clever, Lost Cities R&W, Star Realms, and more.