Mostly agree with these. And I'm pretty happy with the bracket model so far. It does however require everyone at the table to be using the intent in good faith, and not strictly looking at the letter of the law.

I'm blown away that Mana Drain didn't make the list. I feel guilty playing it at all, and have even taken decks apart that I felt became too powerful because of it. It's one of those cards that when I see it used, I'm like "Oh, I didn't realize we were playing at that power level".

I'm also surprised to see Gamble & Deflecting Swat on the list. I feel like they looked at the list and said "We've got to also include some red cards too. But nothing in red is all that great. Well, shit. What does red have that's cheap to cast?"

We never really back up and say 'did you REALLY get that part, because you're going to NEED it for the next 14 years?'. I can remember I was sick for multiple weeks when we were learning division. I came back, and we were already onto the next topic, and it was just assumed I knew it. Now, I was super-lucky, in that I understood multiplication well enough to puzzle it out. Not every student cares, especially when they are like 8 years old. Just want to learn it enough to pass and be done with Math. 'What do you mean I have more Math next year too???'

As soon as you miss a single step in the mathematics education train, well, you're going to be hating math for the rest of your schooling. It's a series of incremental building blocks, but we never double check that each student really has each piece.

I would love to be able to break the cycle of poverty en masse. For too many people, simply being born poor means they will be poor for life.

The part that bothers me, is the more I noodle on this, the only way I see to correct it also involves mass sterilizations. Hey, I'll pay for your food, clothing, & shelter for life, but in exchange you have to have a vasectomy. I don't think that's a great offer. If someone has a better solution, I'm all ears.

74F in the winter. In the summer I usually leave the A/C off and use fans, but if it gets above 90F I'll let it run for a few hours before bed.

I seriously don't understand how people farther north of me survive the cold. And I live in Atlanta, so there's a lot of them.

As a dude who loves Transport Fever 2, you better believe I get this wrong a lot.

I also see 'meeting' abbreviated as MTG. Which, is now what I call it when I send texts to my friends to play Magic. "Hey, got time for a MTG MTG?"

The big change was I had the stairs moved.

Without making a huge story of it, my house has pretty darn large pull-under basement that you access by a garage door. But, the space was cut in half by the stairs. One the one side you could mostly squeeze a car in, but the other side was largely wasted space. So I had the stairs moved to the other side of the house. Now I have a pseudo 3-car garage (2 bays to work on project cars, and room to pull a 3rd in behind them in a pinch).

Mildly interesting, those stairs were moved on purpose by the original owner during the design phase. I actually have the original blueprints, the stairs were supposed to be off the kitchen. Makes me wonder if the next owner will move them again. hah.

I have a window view of a cubicle farm.

There's also a nice skylight. It's giant, it spans most of the cubicle farm. The kind of thing you'd see in an upscale mall. But of course we can't have that, so they covered it with a tarp. (To be fair, it is hot here in the southern part of USA. I get the need to somewhat lower the A/C bill).

I had my house renovated to make it more like what I want. The cost was mind boggling. But holy hell, I really like my house now.

Not sure it still exists anymore, but I remember using "slime forest" to learn Japanese words.

Found it, looks like it might no longer be updated: https://lrnj.com/

I think the government should have a balanced budget.

I'd argue the biggest failure AND success was trying to replace the brake master cylinder on my car when I was in college. I rounded the brake line fittings right off, and ended up breaking the hard metal line as well. Then, drove it to a brake shop (yes, with no brakes), so they could laugh at me, but not only did they fix it, they gave me the friend rate. Likely out of pity, but it was such a nice gesture I remember it to this day.

I learned SO much from that. Biggest was that there's special brake line wrenches specifically for these fittings. But also a lot about how to fix the unfixable. Turns out, just because you don't see the solution, doesn't mean someone else hasn't been in this exact situation before and had to figure it out. And although it doesn't come up often (fortunately), I've had to replace entire metal brake lines since. Now that I know what I'm doing, it's gone from 'impossible' to 'can do'. Which I find awesome.

A lot of it is due to the dealership model. The dealership doesn't have room for infinite inventory, so they only order vehicles that will appeal to a wide audience. Some buyers will not take a yellow car or a blue one, but very few people will reject a grey car that otherwise meets all their requirements. So we end up with: white, white-grey, off-grey, grey, dark grey, bold grey, charcoal, and black.

Interesting to note, if you go look at the 'build your own' options on a manufacture's website, they do still offer colors. But it can be surprisingly difficult to get, as you ultimately have to order through the dealership. The dealership is much more motivated to sell you what's on the lot today, rather than let you order a car that will arrive in 6 months.

Also, my mother calls this year's grey "mud grey", which I find very funny for some reason.

Jesus fucking Christ why didn't you do this back when the Democrats were in power Bernie? Stop fucking virtue signaling. You could have proposed this 4 years ago and it would have had a good chance of actually passing. And that's exactly why you waited until now, isn't it?

It saddens me that Bernie is the least broken politician we have, and he still sucks.

My company tests their fire alarm on Fridays. We are so fucked if we ever actually have a fire on Friday.

FWIW, I have a trans friend who moved to Buffalo, NY for almost this exact reason. Trans friendly, cheap, & good public transit (by USA standards).

SomethingInGERMAN!!!

Okay, little backstory here. When I was growing up, there was this fighting game called Karnov's Revenge, and it was the 90s, so the characters said little 2 second phrases that more or less sounded like words. My friends and I were fascinated by it, ended up adding many of those phrases to our vocabulary. One of those characters was a giant German wrestler named Marstorius - and some of his phrases were just incomprehensible. So we ended up just yelling "SomethingInGERMAN" when he would pull of his big wresting move. No, not a translation, no actual German words were injured. And boyo did that stick, still say it to this day.

https://www.arcadequartermaster.com/kr_characters.html

Driving yes, quite a bit. Especially if you can get out on a racetrack. Was decades after I had left schooling before I realized all that stuff they try to teach you in physics about friction and momentum all actually have real world application for us normies. Would have learned so much more in school if I could have put 2+2 together back then, but I also can't imagine putting 14 year olds out on a racetrack either.

And even when not racing, just the freedom of being able to hop in the car and drive to another state is just downright liberating. Bored? Well, shit, hop in the car, let's go have an adventure! (I will admit, at my age, 'adventure' is code for 'ice cream shop', but it still makes me smile, so fuck it.)

That said, most of us only use our cards for commuting, which is the worst possible experience. It's no wonder so many folks hate driving, their only experience with cars is the bad one. All of us just sitting in traffic wishing we didn't have to go to work. I am seriously angry at our world for not pushing much harder for remote working. We proved it worked great during COVID, and yet here we all are back in the office.

Perma-banned, and the worst part is I'm not even sure why. I logged in while away on vacation, got hit with the 'you're logging in from an usual location, please confirm with an e-mail code', and when I did that, boom, locked with no option to appeal.

I find some humor in that a robot decided I was a robot. Perhaps that will save me when the great robot uprising occurs?

A replacement PCV valve for my car.

Car was around 100,000 miles, figured it was a good time to do a big refresh & replace a bunch of stuff. Spark plugs, belts & hoses, fuel & air filters, fluids, etc etc... While I was at the parts store, guy suggested I also replace the PCV valve. But, it turned out the only one he had in stock was the store brand. $4, sure whatever. Got it home, took the factory one off the car, and sure enough it was gummed up kinda bad. But went to put the new one on, and it just about collapsed in my hands. It was so flimsy, kinda like a drinking straw. Ended up cleaning the factory one & putting it back on, threw the new one away.