OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

I guess the video games probably aren’t canon, but I think it was The Force Unleashed that “revealed” that Vader intentionally planted the seeds of the Rebellion to create an opportunity to overthrow Palpatine, which makes all the times he or his troopers “fail” to stop the heroes make more sense.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

I feel like this list has some games that are too new to put on a “most influential” list. Let’s give it at least a few years to see how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 influence the industry.

On the other end, how is Rogue not on the list? The number of games calling themselves “roguelikes” or “roguelites” has been ballooning every year for the better part of a decade now, and some of its ideas have found their way into other genres, especially the use of procedurally generated level layouts.

Edit: Ohhhhh the poll methodology was to ask people to pick one game, and then they sorted them by popularity. So even though I think Rogue is definitely a top-20-most-influential game, it’s harder to argue for it being top 1. But… that makes it even crazier that KCD2 is on the list. A significant number of people voted for KCD2 as “THE most influential game of all time”? It just came out!

So did they not commit suicide, or was Jobst just wrong about the exact circumstances leading up to it?

Ahhh that’s the part I forgot or didn’t catch, thanks!

So this isn’t the main point of the article, but near the end they mention the fan game Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. I don’t know if I’m forgetting the plot of Gaiden or what, but they say it mixes the original game with the plot of Space Jam which… is not how I’d describe it? My recollection is that it takes place in the post-apocalypse and centers around the power of Barkley’s devastating Chaos Dunk, a dunk so sick that it can nuke an entire city.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Visit Granddad.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

What I don’t get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn’t pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don’t you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don’t like?

And I’m like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.

Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn’t understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn’t have satisfactory answers to questions like “It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn’t use it, why isn’t it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?” So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.

(I guess some of my actual values aren’t popular almost anywhere; I’m a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)

Rick Perry moment

What can I say, I aim to please!

I mean, this is clearly a bit, but I don’t think addicts smoke exactly one cigarette a day. Some people who smoke small amounts never become addicted. I used to smoke, like, half a pack over a few weeks, forget where I left it, and then go months without smoking. Haven’t smoked at all in probably eight years now, not because I intentionally quit but just because I couldn’t be assed to carry them around any more. (I really only started buying cigs so that I could stop telling people I didn’t smoke when they asked to bum one.)

Revanced still works. If yours stopped working, download the latest patches and make an updated .apk.

Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

If you call someone “daddy,” it means you’re having sex and you consider them to be the dominant partner in the relationship (or are roleplaying that for sexual reasons). Your language partner is being a creep.

There is some very old slang, “daddy-o,” which isn’t sexual and would be used with a friend, but using it makes you sound like a jazz musician from the 1940s.

My friend tried to convince me to get into bitcoin early and I didn’t bother, I thought it was just a fad, like my mom “investing” in Beanie Babies.

He spent all his on drugs before the price took off though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯