EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

If you think you’re struggling for enthusiasm now, just wait until you start watching it.

Peak instruction manual. They went so hard. They couldn’t have possibly known how popular and durable the Pokemon brand would be, and yet they still did all this incredible character design.

Also I miss this artstyle for Final Fantasy.

Me too. I miss old instruction manual art in general. Nintendo instruction manuals were little works of art on their own.

This is grounds for a class action suit

Ask a friend or family member? Or just knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if they have a spare egg. You could offer to pay for it, but I feel like most people would happily just give you an egg if you said you needed one for a recipe.

Flawless. No notes.

Getting older and more mature has definitely helped with this. For example, I completely cut out the part where I promise myself I’m going to change the pattern.

As the saying goes, philately will get you nowhere.

The Simpsons’ version of Bill Clinton.

Give us Mario Kart 9, cowards.

That’s the point. The US has effectively unlimited money, or let’s say unlimited liquidity, so their ability to repay is purely based on political issues. That they can’t get their shit together enough politically to avoid their own borrowing costs going up is extremely funny and embarrassing.

The US credit rating has fluctuated since 2011. At one point I think it was as low as A-. Regardless, the idea that it would ever be anything other than AAA is hilarious.

Despite its AA+ credit rating

People do not make fun of the US for having their credit rating downgraded nearly enough. Imagine being the wealthiest country in history with control over the most ubiquitous reserve currency on the planet and the credit rating agencies are like “it’s not that we don’t trust you, but we have standards to maintain.”

In philosophy, it’s called Pasta’s Wager.

Look into design thinking and in particular ideation. There are lots of formal processes, exercises, activities, etc. that are used by individuals and teams in all sorts of contexts specifically for coming up with ideas. The process is usually one of throwing a bunch of things on the table, sorting through them, getting rid of most of them, elaborating on the ones that seem interesting, then following one to completion, or at least to some sort of first draft/prototype/mockup. You then decide whether or not you want to work on the draft further, or decide that it’s a dead end and start from scratch. The thing with “ideas” is that all of them are terrible and only serve to help guide us towards doing something interesting. Creating things is an intensely iterative process, and what you start with is unlikely to look much like what you end up with after a number of iterations.

Ideas are also all derivative. There are no new ideas, just riffs on existing ones. Even most interesting and innovative works have been influenced by past works, or works from different disciplines, or inspired by nature. If you’re looking to make a short comic, start by figuring out what works and artists and styles you like. Try recreating parts of them, or emulating them, or combining elements of them, and see if the results speak to you. That’s one of the few actually useful applications of LLM AI. You can quickly test concepts, maintain some elements and discard others, do mashups, etc. When something grabs you, try to figure out what it is that resonates about it, then try to recreate it with your own spin.

Ultimately, ideas are just prompts for doing work, and having a good idea (to the extent that such a thing even exists) is far less important than being willing to test a number of ideas to find out what will motivate you to spend real time and effort on creating something.

“Living’ la vida loca” would translate roughly as “Ballin’ the crazy ball”, which sounds pretty fun, tbh

There is no evidence that belief in Santa is harmful to children, nor is telling them the truth. They only believe in Santa for like maybe three years, and they’ll figure it out on their own. The vast majority of kids figure it out by age ~7-8. You can tell them whatever you want, it won’t matter either way.

If you do tell them the truth, or they figure it out on their own, be sure to also tell them that even if they don’t believe, other kids do, and being a Santa-truther will not win them any prizes or make them any friends. It’s a good lesson about living in a society.

Twitter Migration Report

I appreciate how many people are ignoring the X rebrand entirely and referring to it as Twitter. I doubt that’ll ever go away fully.

You’re essentially talking about decommodification of housing, which is the only correct answer. It is necessarily impossible for a house to be both affordable and a good investment, and the current status quo means that housing will be used as an investment. Whatever mechanism used to fix the housing affordability problem will require that housing no longer be subject to commodity market forces.