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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I don’t like the Socratic method as it is employed in classrooms. I think the method of questioning is fine, and dissecting a subject can be fun with the right group and foreknowledge, but most instructors absolutely suck at making sure all students are up to speed with whatever is being discussed.

    I don’t see its value as a teaching tool without a strong enough instructor to prepare the students for its use and to guide the discussions in a productive manner.

    Every professor I’ve ever had who used this method basically wasted class time with fill in the blank response questions. These are not higher order thinking discussions and do nothing to actually broaden understanding of whichever subject is being discussed. It seems like a cop out for the professor to me, at least how I’ve seen it used in multiple major universities.

    I’ve had better Socratic discussions while high as fuck with my buddies after class than when we were actually in the lecture hall.







  • I’m really big on Halloween. I decorate the interior of my classroom and my house (sometimes a little outside of my house like cobwebs over the gate and fencing and a tombstone or three, but we had painters working this year, so that stuff stayed in the garage).

    My partner decorates hardcore for Christmas/Yuletide, but it’s all very secular and interior with just a wreath outside on our door, so it’s nice to not have to put up lights lol.

    I don’t do any other holidays, tbh. My grandmother gave us so much stuff for Easter and 4th of July, but we don’t celebrate either.

    We decorate for seasons, generally, and have like spring/summer/fall/winter decor, but that’s mainly just swapping out pillows on the couch and little flower arrangements or a few knick nacks. Some of the Easter stuff was useful for our spring decorations, and, thankfully, my aunt ended up snagging a bunch of the other Easter stuff because she has fond memories of those decorations when she was a child.

    A lot of the other stuff that wasn’t trash worthy (most of the chintzy 4th of July stuff) was scooped up by others in a garage sale, so it was nice to see some other people enjoy those things.

    My grandma has always loved setting up garage sales and she was super sweet to everyone who showed interest or bought her old decorations. It was really nice for her to see these keepsakes go to a new home and know that they were valued.

    She’s mellowed a lot in the last ten or so years and I was a little surprised with how gung ho she was about throwing the cheaper stuff away lol she was acting like the amazing hostess she has always been and saying things like “This is my last garage sale, so only the nice things make it to the tables for sale!”

    I know that’s kind of a tangent, but I really have enjoyed helping her downsize and move into a smaller space near my parents, and thought this story would probably apply to a lot of others’ experiences with family decorations and memories.

    Edit: It was also pretty cute how my grandma was giving things away to people who really liked things. She’s always done this, but this time seemed a little more special and personal for her. She had so much stuff that she made a decent amount on the furniture anyway, but that was definitely not the goal for any of us lol.




  • The delisting is what gets me most (and we’re dealing with that in basically every media catalogue from film/tv to games).

    Well, that and the blatant cash grabs I see with rereleases that end up being console specific and basically unsupported like with the cases of the Wii store and basically every iteration of their online stores since.

    I played Wii and eventually Wii U with buddies for smash but am glad I didn’t own the systems. I know one of my friends gave a lot of money to Nintendo multiple times getting classics like Pokemon Snap and other nostalgia buys on multiple systems.

    My most recent experience with Nintendo was borrowing a buddy’s switch to play Breath of the Wild back around when it came out. I’m pretty meh on their new content and by the way a lot of their recent releases were received, I’m not super interested. Might bug someone to play the Pokemon Arceus one which seems kinda cool, but that would be the extent of my interest and it’s not really nagging at me, anyway.

    My main gripe is that they seem to be doing the bare minimum with their IP (with little innovation in the field/botched releases) and wasting money/resources on what I see as frivolous, shortsighted, lawsuits in the name of protecting their property as well as corporate heavy production that ends up with forgettable and formulaic games.

    Maybe I am now become old, but I don’t care to see the most recent iteration of the Pokemon, Zelda, Mario, or Smash Bros sagas and am perfectly content with replaying N64 to GameCube classics in those series. Probably doesn’t help that I went to college with a bunch of friends who hung out and played Project M with some Halo 3 or Reach sprinkled in for variety lol.


  • I getcha, just have not been stoked about Nintendo’s continual deathmarch against the hydra of emulation.

    I honestly think it’s more of a waste of money than it’s actually worth and the publicity of taking down emulation sites is pretty bad for them (especially when they take down ones which deal with largely abandonware or really old games, like Vimm’s lair did).

    Without getting into the debate over the ethics of piracy or anti consumer practices, jumping into the fray by aggressively litigating and making a splash like Nintendo and Sony seem to focus on likely hurts their bottom line and certainly hurts their reputation with consumers.




  • Interestingly enough, my local Wendy’s has the best fries out of any fast food chains I’ve tried. They are consistently perfectly crisp and salted. Better than how I even remember McDonald’s fries in their heyday.

    I do know that Wendy’s leaves more up to their franchisees than some places, so maybe I just got lucky with the people who own the one by me.