My son pretty much eats his hot dogs this way. He eats a lot of foods this way. When he eats half a donut, it’s usually the top half.

No, I’ve never smoked. I looked it up, and it seems the trend is generally that super tasters prefer real sugar over fake. Obviously everyone is different though.

But I can detect the faintest bit of artificial sweetener. It’s very unpleasant.

I’m a super taster as well. Raw onion is a hard no for me, but caramelized onions are like a cheat code for making every meal delicious.

But you’ve got the artificial sweetener thing backwards. Super tasters tend to prefer real sugar and find the fake stuff cloying and unpleasant. I’d bite into an onion like it was an apple before I’d drink a diet soda.

Also, mayo is delicious.

Eventually turn to shit means it could still be good for like a decade.

I put it in a spoiler tag! It made bubbles appear in the bayou.

But the mystery was half the point.

I don’t think I have autism, but my story to relate to this: I was in downtown Houston once with some friends and I told them about this spot nearby where there’s a big red button that you can push. It was only a couple of blocks away, and no one was interested. It’s a big red button! You push it and it does something! Am I the only one with a sense of adventure?!

Zeus wouldn’t let him. Odysseus was fated to return home eventually.

Well what’s in them then? Did you run out of room on the shelf?

The top of that masher is clearly protecting the cube from the rain, so I’m not sure how the rain is expected to shoot the cube out as in option B.

A.

Nostalgia makes us lie to ourselves.

Have you ever noticed that almost all of the retro games worth playing happen to be the ones you played back in the day? But the games you didn’t play don’t hold up? What a crazy coincidence.

Game design is better today than it has ever been, and it keeps improving. All those old mechanics still exist. You just don’t have to slog through hours of bullshit to get to them anymore. Unless that’s what you want, in which case that is also available.

If you want a manual, play Tunic. If you want punishing difficulty, play Hollow Knight. If you want to delve into new games with unknown mechanics that you figure out as you go, play UFO 50. There are so many options, and you never need to see a microtransaction unless you want to.

There are so many games like that out there. More than there have ever been. If you can’t find them, you’re not looking.

UFO 50

Follow up: a bunch of these employees just got fired the other day because their second game didn’t sell well enough.

It’s not about them making money directly; it’s about whether the studio continues to exist at its current size, which it no longer will.

The founders of the company won’t get a cent, but the coders and the people who labored to create the game are still there and would benefit from it.

So if you want to be anti-capitalist, pirate it, but if you want to support the people who labored to create it, buy it.

Parallel thinking I’m sure, but my kids have an entire book that takes this idea and just runs with it. I think it’s called “Sandcastle”. After the Sandcastle is completed, a bunch of foreign kings and queens show up and start bitching about how they’re getting sand in their clothes.

Honestly when I read that description of AI it just makes me think: we’ve done it. We’ve recreated baseline human intelligence.

I mean do you think every person you interact with is truly understanding and processing everything they hear, or do you think that some of them just react as if on instinct, responding with something that often makes sense but mostly just feels like it makes sense? If you’ve been in the corporate world long enough, it’s hard not to believe it’s the latter. I think it’s just unintuitive how far you can get that way.

In my experience, if someone doesn’t want to be friends anymore, all you can do is move on. Her explanation isn’t an invitation to fix something and try again. It’s just a small attempt at politeness. It may not even be the whole truth. It may even be an attempt at specifically discouraging you from trying again.

Even if you got her to agree to “give you another chance”, what kind of friendship would result from that? You, constantly walking on eggshells to avoid doing something you never realized you were doing? Her, just going through the motions out of guilt for a friendship she tried to end?

Just move on. It’s hard. It’ll stick with you. But just move on.

. . . Now kiss.

A far simpler version that my kids enjoy:

“What does the janitor say when he jumps out of the closet?”