I was on a Ford reddit forum. OP was pissed that their timing belt (chain?) broke, and was convinced that the repair shop she had previously went to had sabotaged her motor. I commented that these things do in fact break, and that the shop might not have been the culprit. Holy Downvotes Batman.

Kept the left over floor tiles. Nearly 30 years later I needed to replace one, had a box ready to go.

“Dogmeat has died”.

Oh no he fucking has not. Reload.

All I can give you by Jason Lancaster

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46kuUZAPxeQ

Model Railroading.

It’s not the worst, but it requires all the key ingredients - you need to own a home large enough to have a ‘spare’ room, which means you’ve got disposable income. And displaying the trains is almost as much fun as running them, so you end building shelves and shelves, which then sprawl out to the rest of the house. Only to realize you’re missing the ‘key’ one from that set, got to go find that, obviously.

And then of course you can’t throw away the boxes, because that would lower the resale value, so you need to rent a second storage unit. Not that you would ever sell them of course. But your kids will be sitting on a goldmine!

And that’s just the collection portion. It’s a crafty hobby, from making scenery & waterfalls & little trees all the way to the special paints to make the engines look aged. That will need a room as well.

And now that we’ve got the train shelves in the kitchen, you know, I could put a food themed railroad on the table there. Yes I already have the desert themed one in the train room and the prairie themed one in the living room and the snow theme layout in the hallway, but I don’t have a silly one. No of course the Halloween theme one doesn’t count.

74F (23C) I grew up in Florida, which is a very warm state. Now I live a good bit farther north, but my body never adjusted to the cold weather. Nice in the summer, as I don’t need the A/C, but the bills in the winter are rough.

Every week I write my weight on the giant whiteboard in the kitchen. I don’t erase it, just keep the log running all year long, for anyone to see. It’s an amazing motivator.

I was banned from Reddit for the crime of using a different computer to login. Fun fact - there’s no appeal for that one. So I decided I had enough of that particular shit show, did some Googling for something similar to the older Reddit from years ago.

Scottish Shortbread Cookies.

Small story - my grandmother on my mother’s side made these cookies that were absolutely my dad’s favorite. Unfortunately, he & my mom separated pretty early, but they stayed local so they could co-parent. So every Christmas, we could tell if dad had treated mom well that year because either there’d be a ton of his favorite cookies, or none at all.

I used to carry a universal TV remote control with me. It’s simply staggering how often it was useful.

“YOU DRIVE VERY FAST”. Screamed at me out her minivan window by a middle aged Indian woman making a left across traffic in front of me. Still cracks me up.

Not a direct answer, but if you ever get a chance - go walk around a self-serve junkyard. This is where cars go when they finally just aren’t worth fixing anymore. It is eye opening. There are cars that you will still consider ‘new’ that have already given up the ghost (mainly Dodge/Chrysler, Hyundai/Kia, & Nissan). And you can’t help but think - WTF are these cars doing here, aren’t these still for sale at the dealership?

Conversely, there are also cars there so old you hardly recognize them (usually Honda, Toyota, and full size pickups from Ford/GM).

I’m super-out of date, so talking about the originals here.

For the Decepticons, I have to go with Devastator / the Constructicons. Something about “We build for EviL” is just so cartoon villian-y that I’ve always loved them. Plus, neon green & purple.

For the Autobots - my first transformers ever were Gears and Cliffjumper - two relative no-name minis, but they have a special place in my heart.

My company is European. Although all our templates are written in English, the check-language is set to Italian. So, pretty much every single word.

And yes, every time a new template comes out, we have to go through block by block and reset them to English. But even then a bunch slips through. Usually takes about a month to filter all the filters out.

9 Parchments - Surprising gem with some depth and a lot of replay value. Reminds me a lot of the Harry Potter universe. We fire this up almost every weekend. I recommend setting friendly fire to ‘self’ instead, as it encourages actual cooperative play.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shredder’s Revenge - this is just a hack n slash quarter eater, but it’s mindless fun.

Witcher 3.

At the risk of sounding negative - if driving a car is too hard for you, maybe you shouldn’t. You’re going to be piloting a 4000 pound boulder down the road. Would you really be okay killing someone by accident?

We live in an age of Ubers & Lyfts. Taxis have never been cheaper nor more convenient. Being car free is totally possible.

Regardless, I would still encourage you to finish your studies and get your driver’s license, if only because it’s the one form of ID every adult is expected to have.

I always put the original Blaster Master on the NES up there.

It had no save capability at all, nor any codes to stop & restart later. When you sit down, you better be ready to do the whole 4+ hours in one playthrough (or just leave the NES on & walk away).

But the kicker was that once you got hit just a few times, you might as well restart. The gun (in person mode) would power down with each hit, and after a few hits, well, you just didn’t have enough ‘oomph’ to kill the bosses. But the power-ups to get the gun were fairly sparse in the first place, so once you got hit, it wasn’t like you could just retrace your steps & power up again.

Mildly interesting, at least to me, I understand it’s been remastered for the Switch. It now has save points AND being hit doesn’t reduce your gun’s power. That would make it a completely different game. I’m be curious to check it out someday. If nothing else, I’m curious to see how much of it I remember. I suspect I can autopilot the first 2 hours, despite it being 40(?) years later.

Landing my job. I had experience with a relatively obscure piece of software. Turns out the company had been looking for weeks and couldn’t find anyone. The guy I was replacing had a new job lined up, so they needed someone ASAP.

Could you point me to a good place to start learning how to troubleshoot? I added Unbuntu as a dual-boot to my gaming rig a while back, and when it works, it’s great. But as soon as I hit an error, I drop back to Windows because I know how to fix shit there.