Damn. Well, if I’ll never get to see it, I suppose I can still imagine it as some far away, legendary place where horror dreams come true.

Have you considered running tours on Halloween? Throw in a few fog machines and black lights, make up some backstory about evil taking over your home or something, and you’ll have the most creative “haunted house” around.

If you ever change your mind, you can just move into my place. Nobody invited the centipedes, yet every spring those creepy bastards find their way in.

Shortly after entering adulthood, I lost a close friend. He was still in college at the time, a talented, friendly, bright light snuffed far too early. He was well loved and his funeral was so packed that it was standing room only. One attendee described it as “the most depressing class reunion ever.”

His loss has never left me.

Right before I got the phone call telling me the news, I had been feeling extremely down about myself. I was crossing my work parking lot (which I had to do regularly as part of my job) without looking up for moving cars, thinking that if I got hit, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But that same day, my phone rang. It was a mutual friend, and through obvious tears and a quavering voice, she told me, “John is dead!”

With that, everything changed.

I’ll never forget how much it hurt to lose somebody so important to me. The idea of purposely putting my friends through that has kept me going more times than I can count. I have to remind myself, even in my darkest, most self-hating moments, that I’m more important to others than I realize. I can’t imagine John would have known just how much of an impact he had made on others, but I saw the proof. I felt the pain. I love my friends and family too much to entertain the thought of making them attend my funeral. And so I push on, but with one change:

I now make a point to explicitly tell my friends how much they matter to me.

It’s been years since I’ve crossed the Canada/USA border, so things may be different today. But when I went, the Canada side was more concerned about smuggled weapons, while the USA side was more concerned about smuggled drugs. Still, it doesn’t take much to trigger a border patrol search.

Apparently if you go from New Brunswick in the morning, spend the day driving through Maine/New Hampshire/Vermont, and cross into Quebec the next day, that’s suspicious enough to get detained for several hours and to have your entire car searched at the border. To me it just made sense to do a straight line drive through those states, since staying inside Canada between those two points would have been a much longer, more convoluted route. Silly me, being logical about my route without considering how others break international law.

Croatia definitely blocks it better. Argentina still has lots of access to the Atlantic, and blocking Bolivia is a team effort between Chile and Peru.

Yet Croatia’s geography is basically a “Fuck you in particular,” practically going out of the way just to block Bosnia & Herzegovina. Chile doesn’t try anywhere near that hard.

How about that roller coaster race level on DKC2? If you don’t go backwards as soon as the race starts, you miss that sweet speed boost.

Bonus points for your appropriate username

Here we are 16 or 17-year-old girls showing up to these random college guys house.

Oh man. It’s scary how normal this is treated. I remember having friends with “older boyfriends” and I always felt really weirded out by it. Yet when you’re a kid (or teen, in this case) and your friends act like it’s normal to want adult boyfriends, you’re put in a really awkward position. I wasn’t able to fully articulate or even comprehend everything fucked up about it at the time, but as an adult looking back, holy shit. There’s an entire hidden social ecosystem where being groomed is not only considered normal, but can be seen as enviable by peers.

One time as a kid, a friend lent me her glasses (I never needed glasses, but I always liked them) and I went to climb a tree. In the tree, looking down, the glasses made it seem like I was much closer to the ground than I was.

So I jumped.

It was extremely stupid. There was a point during the fall when I felt like I should’ve reached the ground already, but I hadn’t. In the end I was fine, the glasses were fine, and my friend thought it was funny. But wow, that could’ve gone disasterously wrong.

That’s what you get for not buying the very latest edition of the textbook. /s

Seriously though, you’re clearly trying to actually comprehend the material, but even the professor was too checked out? I wish I were surprised, but that’s just upsetting. Nobody takes responsibility for education anymore, not the instructors, not the administration, and none but maybe a handful of students who get zero support from either of the above. I’ve learned more from reading on the internet for free than I have from any classroom. But learning for free on one’s own doesn’t give someone a fancy paper that attracts employers. Gotta spend money to make money, yet again.

You’re right. The illiteracy is everywhere. It’s a very troubling sign.

I wonder, were there any other points in history, post-literacy, where a significant amount of people went to school yet still lacked literacy skills? If it has happened, would it even be recorded? Or is this aspect of modern society truly novel?

It’d be nice to know how such a situation would’ve been rectified in the past, but I get the feeling the solution would be the same thing I’ve been calling for since my own childhood - a comprehensive public educational system with a focus on critical thinking.

They probably didn’t link it by default because of Rule 4. However, I think there should be an exception when other users ask for links. (Maybe the rule should be, “No unsolicited self promotion”?)

For the record, I would also like to see this rant.

When search engines started putting lists of videos in response to every query, I fumed. Trying to find a solution to the game issue you’re having? Here, scan through this 10 minute video and hope you come across the part that discusses your specific issue! Oh, it didn’t actually talk about the thing you need? Lol well at least you watched some ads.

I think next time I have a game issue, I’ll be asking about it here on Lemmy. Yeah, the audience isn’t as big as on Reddit, but we’ll never know the depth of the knowledge fellow Lemmings have to offer if we never ask.

The revolution will not be televised.

I feel the same way, but about places that sell coffee having an obligation to provide a public bathroom.

Glares angrily at 7-11

I don’t know about OP. I went to a public school on the eastern seaboard and we certainly weren’t taught “Spain Spanish.” The pronunciations and pronouns we were taught would’ve been very different if that were the case.

If any specific dialect was taught in those classrooms, it would’ve been because a teacher spoke that dialect natively. All of our teachers were either non-native Spanish speakers, or from somewhere in Central or South America. Maybe OP had teachers from Europe?

If there were regional differences for vocabulary, we were told about them. For example, for the English word “bus,” we were taught that “autobus,” “guagua,” and “camion” all work but in different countries/regions. To be clear, we weren’t expected to remember all the variations, but we were informed that they exist.

Here’s a fun trick to stop using Reddit - simply install and use a VPN.

Just like that, Reddit blocks itself for you!

Excellent comment and very informative!

Just a quick note on the last sentence: 1 yard = 3 feet, which means a yard is approximately one meter, not 100m.

It was slower, the graphics were basic, and we could get knocked offline by someone picking up a telephone. But damn, it really felt like reaching out and touching the world for the first time. It took so long for my mom to understand that yes, I can be chatting with friends online at 2am. She would always ask, “Why aren’t they asleep?” and I’d have to remind her that other time zones exist.