Such a good party game.

I don’t recall. But I took the pharmacy test too, the more accurate one.

moldly infuriating

Conversely I woke up in the middle of the night with a cold and couldn’t smell Vick’s VapeoRub, which usually has an extremely strong menthol scent.

I got tested, talked to a doctor, and didn’t have COVID. It’s possible we lose our sense of smell sometimes with other types of colds too, but we never noticed because we didn’t panic about it.

Some people hate things as a hobby. I say that a lot, and I’m really serious.

Some people play video games, watch movies, or read books, and other people just hate stuff. That’s their whole thing. They seek it out. They doom scroll until they find something to hate, and then they latch onto it and spread that hate wherever they can. Most of them don’t even realize they’re doing it.

I’ve seen so many good things fall apart because of this internet hate machine. It’s sad.

It’s still the world. Most of us still have the power to change our circumstances.

Are humans better off than we were 20 years ago? In many ways no, in some ways yes.

Are humans better off than we were for 99.99% of human history? Yes, without qualification.

I watch movies with my wife or my kids, but I very rarely watch a movie alone. I’d rather play games most of the time.

Meanwhile Baba is You is one of the hardest fucking games I’ve ever played.

Well, nobody’s perfect.

I’m just saying, her heroes may be unrealistic, but her villains are a prescient depiction of MAGA. So it’s strange to me when people try to equate Rand with MAGA.

I have ADHD, and this was my childhood. But I also learned some important coping methods, like how to mask. Given how resistant I am to learning behaviors like that, I’m not sure I could have done it without a struggle. Meanwhile the kids who were diagnosed had a stigma on them that I’m glad I was able to avoid.

My parents did their best with what they knew. I’ve got bad memories and good ones, just like every person ever.

With that said, we’ve decided to hold off on having my daughter tested, even though she’s showing some symptoms. If she has it, I don’t want that to be part of her identity until it has to be. If she starts struggling, we’ll take action. Until then, it’s best not to burden her.

We also got extremely lucky with her first grade teacher. She started the year with a very traditional, veteran teacher. Her seating arrangement changed three times in a month because, according to her, the other kids kept talking. But then the school said they had too many kids in the first grade classes, so they started a new class of just 13 students and moved my daughter. The teacher is brand new, just recently certified.

My daughter came home talking about how they constantly do “brain breaks” in between lessons, and other unusual things.

We went to the parent teacher conference, and this teacher is the most ADHD woman I’ve ever met. We did a one-on-one meeting that lasted two hours. And she’s wonderful. She’s the best thing that could have happened to our daughter. She approaches everything in a way that’s perfectly tailored to someone with ADHD, and it sounds like the other kids love it too.

So maybe we’ll have her tested next year.

Well that’s not true either. I mean sometimes, sure, but in general if you know what you want and you work towards it, you can accomplish things and be rewarded.

👍

Absolutely, yes. Good video games have a reward structure that real life is lacking.

It’s like 50 pages long, which yeah, is way too long.

But what he’s actually doing is calling for a general strike. He’s explaining that if every productive person just stops contributing to society for a few years, then the parasitic oligarchy will die out, because they’re not capable of keeping things running themselves.

It doesn’t resolve the overt conflict, but it’s suggested that his plan is in motion by the end.

Video games are art. Just like a movie can be sad or a painting can be distressing, video games are allowed to explore all kinds of emotions.

Sometimes a higher difficulty is part of the artist’s vision. They get to decide how they convey what they want to convey.

One of my favorite new games is UFO 50. It’s a collection of retro-style games where some of them are genuinely very difficult, and others are just do a great job of simulating difficulty. The difficulty drops off right around the time you start to get a handle on the mechanics, so it’s hard to tell if it’s the game getting easier or if you’re just getting better.

I’m all for easy difficulty options in games, but I’m never, ever going to use them. I just can’t motivate myself to play if I’m not accomplishing something.

It’s also a holdover from arcades. Arcade games were difficult because they wanted people to spend another quarter.

Most or fewest?

She bought into the fantasy that the rich get rich because they’re smarter and harder working than everyone else, when really they’re all a lot more Trumpy than she would have thought.

But that’s really specifically the opposite of what happens in the book.

The richest people in the book are referred to as “The Aristocracy of Pull”: people who make their wealth by influencing governments to unevenly enforce economic restrictions. Oligarchs, basically.

The entire point of the book is that these people are parasites who obtain wealth without producing anything of value. The heroes in the story stop them by withholding their labor until the system collapses.

The president in the story is a useful idiot installed by these oligarchs.

That’s literally the whole book. You can argue about her version of utopia: people thriving by exchanging the fruits of their labor under a free market system. But her version of dystopia is pretty much what we’re going through: incompetent sycophants being installed into positions of power by anti-intellectuals who can’t tell the difference between wealth and talent.

I get why people don’t agree with Ayn Rand, but her philosophy absolutely doesn’t align with modern day Republicans. The villains in Atlas Shrugged are about as Trumpy as it gets.