I prefer to watch movies and TV shows in their original language. I feel it loses some of its cultural identity when it’s dubbed in another language. I especially hate when companies change the context of the show to make it relevant to the foreign audience. (e.g. changing rice balls to “jelly donuts” in the English dubbed Pokémon series.)

So when it comes to anime, I’m a huge advocate for watching subbed. I lived in Japan for 3 years and anime just sounds weird to me in English. It’s unnatural. And there are so many interesting cultural quirks with their language that get lost when it’s translated into English. It’s boring when the show is really identifiable as my own culture. I wanna enjoy a different culture’s perspective!

Broaden your horizons and learn more about foreign cultures. Watch your anime subbed! It’ll also improve your reading speed and comprehension skills. I don’t even notice that I’m reading subtitles anymore.

Plus, you’ll be able to easily identify Japanese in the wild after a while. I also lived in South Korea for a couple years and I’m very good at picking out Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, and Tagalog (Philippines) languages, just by sound. Not to mention a handful of European and Scandinavian languages from a few years living in the EU.

I never realized how ignorant and closed-minded I was, living in the US. Traveling abroad made me realize there’s a whole world out there that is extremely different from what I’m used to back home, and it’s given me a new perspective of the world.

I didn’t realize how much of an echo chamber America is. We’re isolated on the other side of the planet from most everyone else and are exposed solely to our own media propaganda, which promotes the idea that we’re the best country in the world and looked up to by everyone else. (We barely make the top 20 lists when compared to other nations, and are generally seen like a cringey edgelord by other countries).

Plus, we only have 2 foreign neighbors, but America is so huge, a majority of Americans don’t live anywhere near the borders and will never bump into Canadians or Mexicans. So most of us live our whole lives without foreign cultural experience, and it’s easy to fear-monger about “invading foreigners.” Watching subbed movies and shows, of any language, is the easiest first step toward stepping outside your comfort zone and exploring other cultures.

I measured like this when my first girlfriend asked what my size was. I told her it was 10". Suffice to say, she was definitely not impressed when the pants came off for the first time. 😅

They cropped off the fourth kid on the bottom, who is afraid of Conor.

Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!

And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.

If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.

I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.

Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.

Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.

I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.

Blindness comes in many different forms. It’s not about your vision being blurred or completely dark. Some blind people can only see clearly through tiny slits or pinholes in their vision.

Imagine a sheet of paper that you poke maybe 2 or 3 small holes in, then hold up a few inches from your face. Those holes are all you can see through in your field of vision; the rest is obscured.

And then there are people who need bottle-lensed glasses just to be able to barely read large 100-pt text in front of their face. They’re considered blind, even though they have some vision.

My mother had a Polish friend from her work who was like this. He had insanely thick glasses and walked mostly without a cane in familiar areas, but would have to touch your face to gauge your reaction while talking with you. Or practically press his face up against yours to look you in the eye. He had a laptop that would scan documents and display them in massive font so he could read them on the go.

Also, one of my best friends in high school woke up blind one day. His corneas detached from his eyeballs; a genetic defect from his family. He didn’t wake up in a dark room, he could still see shapes and colors. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.

I was tasked with walking him to each of his classes in school, because I had experience leading the blind. His greatest annoyance was when people waved their hand in front of his face and asked if he could see it. When he flinched (because a large blurry object came at his head), they accused him of faking blindness because he saw them. But he couldn’t make out what was coming at him, he was just reacting to sudden movements near his face.

My friend eventually got corneal transplants, which restored most of his vision. But he can never drive a car because his vision isn’t good enough to read road signs, even with corrective lenses. He’s considered legally blind.

When you need to split hairs, blind folks will call themselves “legally blind” if they have some limited sight, or “totally/completely blind” if they have no vision whatsoever. But if your optometrist claims you qualify for legally blind, you’re generally considered blind amongst their community and qualify for any associated disability benefits that come with blindness.

It’s not Pixar, it’s Disney.

Pixar got its animation start when John Lasseter got fired from Disney for promoting CG animation over the traditional hand-drawn animation. He moved over to the Lucasfilm CG studio, which was later renamed “Pixar.”

Through Pixar (after Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas), Lasseter and his team proceeded to not only revolutionize CG animation, but to create incredible unique stories with it. They were seen as a real competitor to Disney for a while. They only started making sequels when they started collaborating with Disney.

Eventually, Disney realized the money to be made from CG animation, so they bought out Pixar. Now it’s a Disney product and their ideas are bankrupt once again. We don’t get original stories anymore, just a bunch of unnecessary sequels and garbage films that were probably written by AI.

Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.

My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.

That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.

They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.

Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.

I wore MILES gear in 2006 for combat readiness training in the US military. It was a lot of fun; like adult laser tag, except they paid me to spend a week in the woods, defending a base, fighting OpFor (opposing forces), and using a compass and map to find geocaches hidden in the woods.

I was born in 1984. I’m surprised to see that MILES gear hadn’t changed much in those 22 years.

For our final test in the combat readiness course, we had to spend 3 days in the woods, without sleep, defending our base. It was supposed to simulate the exhaustion you might feel in an actual combat environment, surrounded by enemies and not getting to sleep normal hours.

The first day was business as usual. Fighting OpFor and keeping our base flag from being taken. The second day, OpFor left us alone entirely, because the hallucinations took over. We were all so sleep-deprived, we started seeing things in the woods. Most of our firefights were just people insisting they saw enemies approaching from the woods. One guy swore he saw a deer low-crawling with a rifle toward us.

By day 3, we were all a delusional mess. OpFor returned and started kidnapping people right out of their foxholes. Which we welcomed, because being marched back to their camp with our rifles held over our heads like POWs helped to wake us up. They’d force us to complete some strenuous physical exercises, then release us back to camp.

I sleep for 15 hours straight after we all graduated and went home.

It only had 8 episodes released in 2009. You can watch episodes 2-8 at this YouTube channel. The first episode can be watched here.

I eventually found my soulmate later in life, who is also an introverted nerd. She also pursued me for my looks initially, but stayed because we were intellectual twins.

If there’s any advice I can give for relationships, it’s to look for someone you can be best friends with. If you’re in a relationship just for looks, understand that looks fade.

I’m in my 40s now and gaining weight due to disabilities that prevent me from exercising. Plus I’m starting to bald and growing thick hair literally everywhere else. I’m no longer the “ruggedly handsome young man” I used to be as a teenager. My wife still loves me and cherishes time with me, because we’re best friends, not shallow lovers.

Can confirm, I was awkward and embarrassing as a 19-yr old. I’m sorry to all my ex-girlfriends back then.

Granted, most of them dated me because I had a “bad boy” look and they were disappointed when they found out I was actually a quiet, introverted nerd. I was almost always the dumpee in my relationships.

I block ads too, but a bunch of YouTube channels I follow slip in their own custom-made ads in their vids, and like 70% of them were NordVPN. I couldn’t escape it for a while.

If you message the authors of research papers, 9 times out of 10, they’ll be more than happy to share their papers with you for free.

They’re just happy someone is taking an interest in their work, and they’re not being paid to distribute it anyway.

This is why I’ll never use NordVPN. Their ads are everywhere, which makes me not trust their product.

Besides, the most popular products are the most targeted by malware, hacking, adware/spyware, etc. Lesser known security tools are generally better, as long as the product itself is quality.

Same here. I had been playing World of Warcraft for over a year and still hadn’t reached max level with my main character, so I spent a whole day grinding to finish off the last few levels. Then I walked down the street to my local Walmart and went to hang out in the electronics section until midnight.

This was back when Walmart was open 24/7. I asked an employee where they would be releasing the Burning Crusade Collectors Edition and they said they’d bring them to the electronics register exactly at midnight. So I started a queue next to their sole register. By the time midnight struck, there were about a dozen people behind me in the line.

It was the first and last time I showed up for a midnight release of anything. I personally thought it was worth it, but I never did it again. The next WoW expansion released while I was stationed overseas with the US military, so I had to order it online.

If you’re in your 30s-40s, it’s rad. If you’re in your 20s or younger, it’s fire.

Same thing, different generational name.

Taco Bell

Pizza Hut if you saw the international version of the film. Taco Bell wasn’t well known outside the US at the time, so they changed the restaurant to something more familiar for international audiences.

I would love to see ReBoot (1994) with modern CG. And also a modernized plot, considering we know so much more about computers and the Internet now.

1994 was when the Internet started to spread publicly around the world and became a thing you could access from your very own home. It was this cool new technology that connected humanity across the globe, but most people didn’t really understand it yet.

So shows like ReBoot captured our fascination with the “Information Superhighway” and built a fantasy/sci-fi story around it. Even if it was horribly inaccurate to how computers and the Internet actually worked.