BotW and TotK are such weird games to me

They built these big beautiful worlds, and designed some really cool mechanics

And just kind of did nothing with them.

TotK was a bit better, but still fell pretty short.

Also it’s so weird that TotK is clearly a direct sequel to BotW, but there’s almost no actual continuity between the games. There’s a handful of characters that are missing without much of an explanation, and other characters from the previous game act as if you’ve never met them before. I get that for gameplay reasons you kind of have to start things over from square one in some ways, but it just felt weird.

And the weapon degradation never really felt fun to me. I feel like at the very least once you get the master sword and recharge it to its full power or whatever you should have that as an option that just doesn’t wear down, even if other weapons that do break might be better suited for the task.

And having to go out and farm a thousand different fish and master parts and whatever else to upgrade your armor is just bullshit.

I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here’s a couple standouts

Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo

Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce

Mac & cheese

Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato

Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions

Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping

Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon

Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots

Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns

Chicken Tika masala

Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic

And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.

A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don’t think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

Anecdotally, really just shoplifting in general.

I work in 911 dispatch, been there for about 7 years, so long enough to have a decent feel for how things have changed since before COVID.

And while I’m not keeping a personal tally, it definitely seems like over the last couple of years I’ve been getting a whole lot more calls about shit like people stealing a single red bull from a convenience store. (Yes, they call 911 for that sometimes, and we also answer a lot of the 10-digit non emergency lines, it all pretty much has to go through us one way or another, it’s the same cops responding whether it’s an emergency or not so at some point it has to end up with central dispatch)

We actually have a couple convenience stores with security guards now because of this.

Most burritos I’ve had have the ends folded in which may make them a calzone

nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in

There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around

Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)

Michelin Stars started out as a travel guide brochure for the best restaurants in France as a sort of advertisement for Michelin branded tyres

It was really more of a way to get people to drive more and so have to buy more tires (hopefully Michelin)

The original guide had things like maps, tire shops, gas stations, and tire repair instructions. Back then, cars were still new to a lot of people, and Michelin figured that a lot of people probably wouldn’t know where they could go get gas or new tires or whatever, but if they had that information people might be inclined to drive more. If you didn’t know where you could get gas along your trip you may not want to take that drive after all.

Then after a while they started including things like restaurants to give people more of a reason to go driving around.

How did the Michelin stars become so sought after by top restaurants and chefs?

It’s advertising. If you make it into the guide, more people are going to hear about and want to come to your restaurant. And since the guide has such a good reputation, it’s seen as a badge of honor that this restaurant/chef is good enough to be recognized with a star.

Was the head of the Michelin tyre company also a renowned food connoisseur or something?

No, they were renowned tire manufacturers. But they were French and that probably didn’t hurt the branding since French food has such a good reputation. I’m sure subconsciously on some level a lot of people are going to give a bit more weight to a French company rating restaurants than, for example, an American one.

What about other tyre companiee, why didn’t they do something similar?

Why bother when Michelin was already doing it? You don’t need to buy Michelin tires to eat at a Michelin-Stared restaurant. Regardless of where the guide came from it got people driving around more and needing new tires.

There’s other travel guides out there, some focus more on other things besides restaurants, some focus on areas not covered by Michelin, some overlap or compete with Michelin or position themselves as sort of an anti-Michelin because they disagree with the criteria Michelin rates restaurants on.

And I’m sure some of them are or have been in the past published or sponsored by tire companies. But Michelin managed to get into the game early enough and did it well enough that they just became sort of the restaurant guide.

And other tire companies have taken other advertising routes that are maybe a little less obvious. Let’s consider the Goodyear blimp flying over sporting events. I’m sure there’s a small element of “you should drive to sporting events to see our blimp ~and also wear down your tires a bit in the process~” at play there.

Are Michelin Stars still given by the tyre company, or has it been spun off into its own thing?

Yes it’s still the Michelin tire company. I don’t have any real insight into their corporate affairs, so I don’t know how much crosstalk there is between the tire-manufacturing and the guide-writing parts of their business these days, but it is still the same company.

1. A “truckers” (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.

2. I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car’s power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.

(Handheld CBs do exist. I’ve very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)

3. It’s probably gonna depend on where in the country you are, but CB radio equipment is in fact not commonly available at gas stations and truck stops around me. It’s something I actually actively look for and take notice of because I’m a bit of a radio geek. In fact, if I needed to tell someone where to get a CB locally, their best bet for that would probably also be the-store-whose-name-you-seem-too-think-that-no-one-should-say-like-its-fucking-voldemort-or-something, and even that would be hit or miss, some TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOSes don’t actually seem to carry them, but every TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOS I’ve ever been in absolutely has at least one set of FRS radios for sale.

Because they’re fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.

It’s basically shorthand for “this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas”

As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you’re probably not going to be able to find it locally.

I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them

It is actually really handy when you’re road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you’re having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.

If you’re fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.

It’s especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.

You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you’re listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it’s just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.

After sitting outside for a few days getting a little bit shriveled I think they look even better. This pic is actually from almost a week ago when they were freshly -carved, if I remember I’ll snap a new pic of them later on

But yeah, I think they just generally have a lot more character than pumpkins, and you can usually get a couple turnips for the price of one decent carving pumpkin

The trick or treaters in my neighborhood always seem to appreciate them too, even if half of them don’t seem to know what a turnip is (a disappointing amount both of kids and parents call them onions)

I just use a forstner bit in a cordless drill to do most of the work, so not really.

It would probably be a bit of a pain if you were to do it all by hand

A few previous year’s turnips

I remember hearing somewhere that the final exam to be certified as a master calligrapher is to make your own certificate.

My own handwriting is barely legible to myself sometimes, so I’ve never looked too far into it, so I can’t say if that’s actually true or not, but it’s a cool idea if true.

I think the basic premise of your question is kind of flawed.

Generational age brackets are always a little fuzzy, but most definitions tend to define millennials as people born from about 1981-1996

Which means come the end of the 90’s, the oldest millennials were just turning 18, the youngest were just entering preschool, the “average” millennial would have been about 10. Personally, I was 8 in 1999.

So most of us weren’t exactly politically-aware in the 90s, let alone actively criticizing anything besides homework. And a lot of us probably had parents who wouldn’t have let us listen to RATM because of the parental advisory sticker on their albums.

My main concerns at the time were things like video games and cartoons

Then right around the time we started to be old enough to really form political opinions, 9/11 happened and the world went insane around us.

I may be missing something obvious here, but put it in the cart?

Of course carrying a bag of some kind would also be an option, just a small backpack, messenger bag, etc. I have a surplus Czech military map bag I use for some d&d boosk and a folder of character sheets and such that would probably be about the right size for a portfolio, pretty sure there’s a ton of them still available from various military surplus websites for pretty cheap.

If you can put Velcro on the portfolio and the cart that could work. If the cart happens to be steel you could also do magnets

You could also strap, Velcro, magnet, clip, zip-tie, etc. some kind of bag, bin, etc to the cart specifically for it. Not sure exactly what kind of cart we’re talking about but some sort of a bicycle backpack with hooks to mount on a cargo rack may be an option to hook right onto your cart

If you want to get really extra, you can get an auto follow drone to carry it around for you, or if your workplace is cool with pets, get a dog with a backpack to follow you around, or perhaps hire a personal assistant (these last suggestions are not meant to be taken literally)

Around 10-15 years ago I worked in a pizzeria with a little sports bar. We had more than a couple people who were there almost every day.

I still stop by there once in a while, and without fail I run into at least one of those old regulars every time.

I have a big bushy beard which somewhat limits my costume options if I’m going for any kind of accuracy unless I want to wear a mask

My two standby costumes that I dust off when I find myself with unexpected Halloween plans are

A lawn gnome. I dye my beard white, put on a blue ren faire sort of tunic, a wide belt, and a red pointy hat

And a Monty Python lumberjack. Red flannel shirt partially unbuttoned over a bra, suspenders, high heels, and a knit hat. I also have a big ol’ double bit felling axe I may trot out if the occasion warrants it.

I suppose I can also lose the heels and bra and just be a regular lumberjack.

It is a bit outside of my area of expertise, but if I understand what you’re asking, the police usually aren’t going to just call up your family and say “hey, your adult child just did a crime and we thought you should know”

Unless there’s a good reason for them to do that. If they suspect that you may be a danger to your family, they’ll of course advise them and give them some more details.

Or if they’re trying to locate you, they’ll probably contact your family, but usually they’re going to keep details vague, they probably won’t come right out and say “we think your kid just robbed a gas station o do you know where he is so we can arrest him?” They’ll probably keep it to something more like “he may have been present during a robbery and we have some questions for him”

But of course every situation, police department, individual officer, etc. is unique, so I won’t claim that there’s absolutely no situation where that might happen.

The specifics are probably going to depend on where in the world you are, in the US it’s generally going to be a no unless you’ve specifically listed them as an emergency contact, they’re your medical power of attorney (which is separate from legal power of attorney) etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, so I’m not specifically covered by HIPAA, though we have some similar regulations and obviously we rub up against the edges of the healthcare field. My wife also works in a psych hospital, and my sister in a nursing home so I get to hear a lot of stories about stuff like this.

My wife has to deal with a lot of cases where a parent is trying to contact the hospital about their adult child who’s a patient there, but since they’re not listed on the correct paperwork the hospital can’t even confirm that their child is in fact a patient there, even though they were standing right there next to them when they were admitted a couple hours earlier.

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I get calls at work a lot because someone’s child/parent, boyfriend/girlfriend, brother/sister etc. was taken to the hospital by ambulance earlier, and when they called the hospital they can’t tell them they’re there because they’re not on the paperwork, so they call us freaking out trying to figure out where their loved one is, and all I can say is that they were transported to the hospital, I can’t tell if they haven’t finished signing it, already been discharged/left AMA, if they possibly had to be transferred to a different hospital, or more likely the hospital just can’t confirm anything because the person calling isn’t an emergency contact.

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Recently I had a call from a woman who was freaking out. Her husband was missing, his car was in the driveway, and she saw a lot of blood around the house.

While she was on the phone with me her friend was calling the hospital to check if he was there, but the hospital couldn’t tell her.

Then her friend gave her the phone, and since she was listed as an emergency contact they confirmed that he was in fact there.

What happened was that he had a bad nosebleed and had his brother give him a ride to the hospital, but didn’t tell her and of course he was an older guy who never has his phone turned on.

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My sister once had a patient who had apparently led one hell of an interesting life, and at different points had been a doctor, a lawyer and a priest, so aside from his resume sounding like the setup to some kind of joke, he also knew his way around all of the ins and outs of how the whole system worked, but being a patient in a nursing home with probably the early stages of dementia setting in, he wasn’t always acting rationally, and apparently it was an absolute nightmare for the staff and his family to navigate the changes he was making to his paperwork while he was there.