u/virtualadept

Annoying, Trying, and Twisted.

Several excellent how-to books have been written over the years. They can all be found on the Internet Archive.

I have found this to be the case in the last several years. I don't like it. But I need to function.

I keep going. Failure is not an option.

Make donations in his name to every Democratic candidate in your area. It doesn't have to be a lot, just $5us would be enough. That should get him on quite a few mailing lists.

I'd be more afraid of Scientologists than postal inspectors. Postal inspectors have rules they follow.

What kind of feedback did you give the team?

Vampire Hunter D.

Wicked City.

Bubblegum Crisis.

Demon City Shinjuku.

Akira.

Appleseed.

Battle Angel.

Dominion Tank Police and New Dominion Tank Police.

Black Magic M-66.

Cyber City Oedo 808.

Darkside Blues.

Shin Seki Evangelion.

Fushigi Yuugi.

Golgo-13: The Professional.

Macross. Macross Plus.

Maetel Legend (since you like Galaxy Express 999).

Ninja Scroll.

Utena.

Salamander.

Slayers.

Tokyo Babylon.

I've noticed this as well. I've taken to using ripgrep to search for files on my work laptop.

Madballs? Looks like... well, not gen one (I used to have Oculus Orbis).

Not gonna lie, I'm impressed it made it that far. That's not an easy soldering job.

Overalls were a brief fad when I was in middle school ('91-'92, I think). Usually worn down, or with only one strap on a shoulder.

Some take the claims of divine inspiration at face value.

Some people seem to be hardwired to need to believe in something. Or, to put it another way, hardwired to need to put faith in something.

Some people just say they do, but are smart enough not to cop to it.

Everybody's different, and everybody has at least somewhat different reasons.

Yes. Aside from the fact that dead trees can't be silently deleted or edited on my devices, books don't need periodic recharging and they don't shatter if they're dropped.

Only when you're what's coming around.

I think you're right.

My government would hang up on them.

I don't think so.

During the first dotcom bubble (late 1990's) comp.sci programs were full of folks who were openly vocal about why they were in that major ("The salary."). At least where I went to college, the ratio was about 2.5:1 (folks in it for the money versus nerds who loved computers), and they were the first ones to take the enterprisey technology classes (SQL databases and Java at the time, legacy technologies were by major requirements only). On the one hand, if we really wanted to take that Java class there wasn't any room. On the other hand, they stayed away from courses like compiler design, computational linguistics, and operating systems.

When someone has no interest in what you have to say, only in talking.

Radio Shack, too. Back before "You have questions, we've got blank stares."

For starts, I used to use the dictionary to look up what the thing was. Just because I had an idea of what something 'should' be called, doesn't mean that's what it actually was called. So, that gave me an idea of what words to look for.

After that, I hit the encyclopedia because that contained much more information than the dictionary did. I used to have a children's encyclopedia of technology, so that's the first place I'd look. If school was in session I'd check the encyclopedia in the library; if not (or if it was a weekend) I'd go to the community library and check the encyclopedia there. This gave me two things: Background information on the topic (which gave me an idea of how likely it was to find books on the thing) and an idea of what questions I could ask (in other words, the 100-level questions were answered). This also gave me an idea of where in the Dewey decimal system to look for books on the topic.

Next, the card catalog. I started compiling a list of books that seemed like they talked about the thing I wanted to know about and went back into the stacks to leaf through them briefly. If they didn't actually have any information I put them back; if they did I picked the three that seemed most useful (our library had a limit of three books per topic) and checked them out. Then I sat down to read them once or twice. Learning physical skills of some kind was limited to whether or not I could get hold of the things needed somehow (usually it was some years), but at least I knew the theory.

Later on I started finding text files on BBSes about some of the stuff I was interested in, so I used to download those, print them out, and read them that way. That was how I got my first copy of The MIT Guide to Lockpicking, for example. Once actual net.access was a thing, it got even easier to look stuff up (or used to be, anyway) to learn.

Vaguely. I sort of recall not liking the voices.

D&D (red box edition). AD&D (first edition). Cyberspace (first edition). White Wolf around the end of high school.

I've been working my way through a couple as an escape from how things are going.

Never. Unsurprisingly.