I was being silly.

It leans a little more toward academic than some of the others here, and spans a broader time span, but History of The World p1 is pretty good.

You bastige. You fargin sneaky bastage. Why you miserable cork-soaker!

Watership Down.

Anything but grape. Apricot is a favorite.

I’m in the building sciences. The biggest unanswered question we come up against almost daily is “what the fuck was the last guy thinking?”. And we avoid, daily, admitting we were the last guy somewhere else.

It’s this exactly. The minute you stop learning, or think you know it all, is the minute you start declining. There is always something new to learn, some new innovation, a new system or procedure. I believe this is true for absolutely everything. I think it’s why older generations get bitchy about “these kids today” too. Shit changes and people stagnate because they know it all already.

But just keep a clear head, know that life is dynamic and try to find the joy in the process of getting better, don’t get hung up on the goal of doing it perfect or being the best. Anyone of value will recognize your effort to simply improve.

I’ve been a carpenter since I was 18 and a finish carpenter since i was 30. I’ll be 52 this year. So I’ve been doing this for 34 years. By all regards, I’m an expert in my field. My work has been on magazine covers, my work has won awards for architects and designers. I’m known by name by top builders and firms in my area. I now run jobs as a superintendent and/or project manager. I get calls to come work for other companies on the regular.

I still have zero idea why. Like, I just tell people what to do in an order that makes sense. And before that, I beat nails into wood. It wasn’t till about 3 or 4 years ago when my wife took me aside and explained to my face that, yeah, I’m really good at my job that I started to realize that, yeah, I’m pretty good at my job. But everyday, driving in, I’m still just a kid that’s in over his head. I don’t feel confident at work. I know on one level I’m doing OK, I mean I must be, right? But I just come in and do my best and hope it’s good enough. Turns out, that it usualy is good enough.

And I can tell you this. Anyone that walks around super confident in their work, usually sucks at their job. I’ve seen dozens of people claim that they’re the best around, only to get axed or laid off as soon as possible. Don’t bother being confident in your work, be confident that you’re doing the best that you can do and be confident that you have the ability to keep learning.

That’s a fun one. You get to see the same movie twice but it’s different both times.

Yeah, I watch that about once a year. It’s, I think, the only time travel story that actually follows it’s own rules. Have you seen Upstream Color? Same guy, really interesting story. It can lead into Blade Runner 2049 elements about consciousness and memory.

I was running a Mork Borg session once and the pc’s came across a fountain in the middle of a cave. It was a pretty dirty cave, as is all of MB, but this fountain was just a clean, fresh, cool water source. It was like 10 or 15 irl minutes of debate and thought. I had one roll a random die and that triggered one players dog to drink from it. It was fine. They refilled their waterskins and one even washed their feet. It gets mentioned everytime there’s an odd thing in a setting now.

When all else fails, Audiobookbay and and Anonamouse are my go-to sites.

Yeah. After how they did Chani wrong I started thinking about everything that got left out. I get most of it, the book was basically hundreds of pages of internal exposition. That’s hell to go over every detail. Hawat being left out in pt2? I get it. Not going into detail of the black and white knifes in Feyds duel? Sure. Sister Alia not being born yet? I guess so. But leaving out big stuff like the spacing guild going after Paul or how deep the BG breeding program goes? These are fundamental to the book. I wanted to love pt2. But I don’t think I do. I’m in a funny sci-fi post-apocalyptic book series now but right after that, I’m re reading Dune. And I only once went through all of the og six books, but I’ll probably do the second after that. I dunno, as far as a couple of movies go, Dune 1 and 2 are probably OK. But for a book adaptation, I think the second missed the mark pretty bad.

I hear ya. Pay in the minimum. Bump it up asap though. I’m 51. I never paid into anything. I have to work for at least 20 more years because of it. Save now.

Make sure you’re adding (at least) the max they’ll match. I get paid hourly and they match up to 4%. I make them do the math so that no matter how many hours I work, it’s 4%. The office lady tried to make it easy and just calculate 4% on a 40hr week, but I work over 40s a fair bit. Nope, thanks, but I want all 4%. Will it mean early retirement? No. Does it matter in the least? No, I work hard for my money and I want it all. There’s never a reason to turn down free money from work.

Would You be Impressed by Streetlight Manifesto. https://youtu.be/A-UTPKL-UGY?si=Ikf6Ka8ML1tKkDSN

Barbiturates. I’m over doing drugs recreationaly, and up was always my preferred direction, but sometimes just being baked and too mellow to do anything looks appealing.

I have 3 kids. I’ve never lied to them about Santa. I’ve always told them that the idea behind Xmas was kindness and giving and left it at that, and that the whole Santa thing was just a fun story to play along with, like the tooth fairy or social equality.

Nah. I had several bad acid trips in a row and getting high was never fun after that. I’m at a point now where I enjoy being sober so much I don’t even take heavy duty cold meds. But I did fight in the war on drugs and now it’s legal where I live. So at least I fought the good fight for, and with, others.

I dropped out of high school because it was interfering with my smoking pot and skateboarding schedule. A skatepark opened up by me (this was before concrete parks were the norm) and I managed to get a job building and maintaining ramps there. My friend and I had always built little kickers and quarter pipes but this was on a larger scale. So I went out and bought a book on geometry and taught myself circles and domes and stuff like that. Being interested in the outcome, not just the problem, was the thing that clicked for me. Once the interest was there, the work and study was fun. Since then, I’ve become a finish carpenter and specialize in odd trim details and complicated builds. So I guess my advice is to find a reason to learn it. Find that thing that makes it more than rote memorization and turns it into something more than that.