Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!

And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.

If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.

I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.

Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.

Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.

I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.

Blindness comes in many different forms. It’s not about your vision being blurred or completely dark. Some blind people can only see clearly through tiny slits or pinholes in their vision.

Imagine a sheet of paper that you poke maybe 2 or 3 small holes in, then hold up a few inches from your face. Those holes are all you can see through in your field of vision; the rest is obscured.

And then there are people who need bottle-lensed glasses just to be able to barely read large 100-pt text in front of their face. They’re considered blind, even though they have some vision.

My mother had a Polish friend from her work who was like this. He had insanely thick glasses and walked mostly without a cane in familiar areas, but would have to touch your face to gauge your reaction while talking with you. Or practically press his face up against yours to look you in the eye. He had a laptop that would scan documents and display them in massive font so he could read them on the go.

Also, one of my best friends in high school woke up blind one day. His corneas detached from his eyeballs; a genetic defect from his family. He didn’t wake up in a dark room, he could still see shapes and colors. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.

I was tasked with walking him to each of his classes in school, because I had experience leading the blind. His greatest annoyance was when people waved their hand in front of his face and asked if he could see it. When he flinched (because a large blurry object came at his head), they accused him of faking blindness because he saw them. But he couldn’t make out what was coming at him, he was just reacting to sudden movements near his face.

My friend eventually got corneal transplants, which restored most of his vision. But he can never drive a car because his vision isn’t good enough to read road signs, even with corrective lenses. He’s considered legally blind.

When you need to split hairs, blind folks will call themselves “legally blind” if they have some limited sight, or “totally/completely blind” if they have no vision whatsoever. But if your optometrist claims you qualify for legally blind, you’re generally considered blind amongst their community and qualify for any associated disability benefits that come with blindness.

Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.

My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.

That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.

They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.

Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.

I block ads too, but a bunch of YouTube channels I follow slip in their own custom-made ads in their vids, and like 70% of them were NordVPN. I couldn’t escape it for a while.

This is why I’ll never use NordVPN. Their ads are everywhere, which makes me not trust their product.

Besides, the most popular products are the most targeted by malware, hacking, adware/spyware, etc. Lesser known security tools are generally better, as long as the product itself is quality.

Same here. I had been playing World of Warcraft for over a year and still hadn’t reached max level with my main character, so I spent a whole day grinding to finish off the last few levels. Then I walked down the street to my local Walmart and went to hang out in the electronics section until midnight.

This was back when Walmart was open 24/7. I asked an employee where they would be releasing the Burning Crusade Collectors Edition and they said they’d bring them to the electronics register exactly at midnight. So I started a queue next to their sole register. By the time midnight struck, there were about a dozen people behind me in the line.

It was the first and last time I showed up for a midnight release of anything. I personally thought it was worth it, but I never did it again. The next WoW expansion released while I was stationed overseas with the US military, so I had to order it online.

Taco Bell

Pizza Hut if you saw the international version of the film. Taco Bell wasn’t well known outside the US at the time, so they changed the restaurant to something more familiar for international audiences.

I would love to see ReBoot (1994) with modern CG. And also a modernized plot, considering we know so much more about computers and the Internet now.

1994 was when the Internet started to spread publicly around the world and became a thing you could access from your very own home. It was this cool new technology that connected humanity across the globe, but most people didn’t really understand it yet.

So shows like ReBoot captured our fascination with the “Information Superhighway” and built a fantasy/sci-fi story around it. Even if it was horribly inaccurate to how computers and the Internet actually worked.

The Lion King (1994) is Hamlet.

“O” (2001) is Othello.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is based on two minor characters of Hamlet.

She’s the Man (2006) is Twelfth Night.

Romeo + Juliet (1996) is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is Homer’s Odyssey. Not Shakespeare, but a brilliant modern retelling of one of humanity’s oldest surviving stories. In the same vein as the above mentioned films.

These are all I can think of off the top of my head. Not to mention dozens of modern Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth retellings over the years. Those three alone are the more popular Shakespeare stories for reinvention on the big screen.

The 2011 The Thing wasn’t so much a remake as it was a prequel to the remake, telling the story from the Norwegian scientists’ camp.

The 1982 John Carpenter remake opened with the last two remaining Norwegian scientists chasing “The Thing” until it reaches the Americans’ camp. But they’re misunderstood by the Americans. When trying to shoot at The Thing, which has taken the shape of a sled dog, the Americans instead return fire and kill them. Then the Americans explore the Norwegian camp and try to figure out what horrors killed everyone there, while slowly discovering why they were shooting at a dog in the first place.

The 2011 film shows what happened to the Norwegians before the 1982 remake. You’re correct, it wasn’t as great of a film (hard to compete with John Carpenter), but it wasn’t exactly a remake.

When I was a civilian, everyone called it military time, because only the US military used it.

When I joined the US military, they called it International Time, because the rest of the world used it and we were just meeting international standards so there’s no confusion with our global allies.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I’ve had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn’t know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I’ve not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn’t quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I’ve noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I’m no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town’s parks committee. Lately, I’ve been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town’s homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I’m only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I’ve spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It’s been wonderful. I’ve even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It’s so convenient!

This is an absolutely brilliant move by Valve. Get more buyers purely for the quirky behavior of the controller, then sell even more when people accidentally break them from throwing them on the ground. They’re just printing money at this point.

A lot of open-world games give an “endless world” vibe, even if the game itself has a finite plot.

For example, games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the entire Just Cause franchise, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 and 2, etc. are all games that let you continue to explore the game and do whatever you want, even after the main plot has been completed.

My friends and I like to fool around in the Ghost Recon and Division games, even though we beat them ages ago. It’s fun to just explore and cause mayhem and destruction, fighting infinite waves of baddies. And there’s not much grinding required because we leveled while playing through the main story. As long as the world is immersive and you can find stuff to do, you could practically play forever.

Actually, a great example of this would be Enshrouded. It’s an open-world crafting/base-building game, but it’s set in a medieval fantasy world, so there are quests to accomplish, lore to discover, and gear/weapons to acquire, build, and level. And when you’re bored of that, you can just settle down and build your own fantasy city. And it’s all single-player, unless you want to invite friends into your game. Or you can make your session public and let strangers check out your game. You can lock down their access so they can’t destroy anything you’ve built or take any of your resources. Then you guys can quest together or build epic castles or villages or Hobbit homes together.

A similar game that just released is Windrose. It’s the same base-building/questing concept as Enshrouded except instead of medieval fantasy, it’s theme is pirates in the Caribbean in the 1700s. You get to build and sail ships in this game, and even duel against other ships!

Heck yeah! It was pretty much the only way I could play RuneScape.

Other people were the one thing I hated about MMOs. I just want to enjoy a massive fantasy world with no definitive end to it. But people kept being… well… people. Every time I had to deal with others, the immersion was broken. Most people were there to play the game, not appreciate it.

Even on RPG servers, it was hard to find anyone who wanted to explore the world and enjoy the setting. Everyone wanted shortcuts to fly through quests, dungeons, raids, etc. as quickly as they could. They just wanted to level up fast and min/max their stats, weapons, and armor build. People would genuinely get mad at me if I didn’t play a certain way, or understand how a boss fight works, even though it’s my first time in that dungeon. I’d need to do online research before entering a raid or dungeon with a party, and that just ruins the enjoyment of discovering a new challenge.

Even “newbie-friendly” guilds, which claimed to be more immersive and helpful for exploring and leveling, would either require regular engagement with scheduled guild activities to stay a member, or they would be dead, with almost no one online to play with at any given time.

And that’s just allies. If you’re playing a game with PvP, then you had to worry about being ganked out in the open. I could be out soloing a quest and suddenly a player just attacks out of the blue. Now it’s a game of survival and I’m already at a disadvantage. It’s either fight a losing battle or hope to run and hide.

Screw people. I prefer playing solo in MMOs. Just leave me alone to enjoy the game at my own pace.

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

I wish I was a millionaire. If I liquidated all of my assets, I might have about a million… But in liquid cash, I’m a low thousandaire. 😅

I joined the US military at 18 years old; I literally left for basic training 2 weeks after I graduated high school. After 20 years of service, you qualify for an official retirement if you so choose.

So at 38 years old, and after suffering through one Trump presidency, I decided it was time to grab my benefits and get out before he somehow got reelected again. It was definitely a good time to leave; it seems that Pete Hegseth has ruined what remaining integrity the military had. I couldn’t serve in today’s military.

Anyway… I joined back when the US military offered a pension. So even though it went away 7 years before I retired (replaced with a 401K-type program), I was grandfathered into the old program because I wouldn’t be able to serve long enough to build up a proper retirement savings. So I now get 50% of my former military pay in my bank account every month for the rest of my life. It’s not much money, but I’ll never starve or go homeless.

On top of that, the military broke me (mentally and physically), and I was quite literally limping my way to retirement. I was walking with a cane at the end of my service, and the only reason they didn’t medically separate me is because I was close to retirement and didn’t need my legs to do my job. I was an IT professional, so I mostly sat at a desk all day.

When I retired, I had enough approved medical claims with the VA that they gave me the coveted “100% Permanent & Total” rating. So I get a lifetime monthly pay from the VA that’s twice the amount of my pension, plus free medical and dental for the rest of my life.

My wife served too, but she only made it to 12 years before they medically discharged her. She was too broken to continue serving and she somehow also qualified for that rare 100% P&T rating. So she gets the exact same VA pay and lifetime benefits as me, just no pension for herself.

So with all that passive income, we don’t really need to work anymore. Granted, we’re not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. But we have enough to pay the bills and live comfortably right now. We did have to sacrifice our minds and bodies to earn it, but we’re not so disabled that we can’t get out of the house and live a little. We just can’t be as active as we used to, which is fine. We’re both introverts, so we don’t mind sitting around the house most of the time. It helps us not drain our bank account.

Oh, and I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed away, so we have a house on 6 acres of land in the countryside. My state gives huge property tax deductions for 100% disabled veterans, so we’re paying practically nothing in taxes to live here. So we’ve also managed to dodge the housing crisis.

We’re actually helping the mother of a friend of mine who can no longer afford her city apartment (after her house was foreclosed on when she was 95% done paying the mortgage!). So she’s living with us for a while, until her son finishes building her a retirement hut on his tiny sliver of land in Hawaii. If he’ll ever get there; he’s also living here until he can afford to move to Hawaii and build his own small hut on his land.

We’ve been pretty fortunate, despite the disabilities. But it is a shame that we had to sacrifice our bodies just to get the kind of benefits and security that a lot of European countries have. We need medical reform bad.

Heck, I’m dreading the day when Trump decides to gut the VA and take our benefits. I’ll have to go back to work if that happens, and I’m not looking forward to dealing with the job market. One of my friends has a finance degree from Harvard and even HE has been job hunting for over a year now! He applied to just over 100 jobs before he got a single callback… and they didn’t hire him. It’s rough for everyone now.

TL;DR - The military broke me and my wife. We’re both 100% disabled according to the VA and earn just enough in pay and benefits to not need to work anymore. And I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed, so we have a place to live without dealing with rent or a mortgage