Wow, you’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas!

I’ll happily supply the hacksaw to keep you occupied.

I actually love that we have resourses like this.

My gripe is that they miss the mark by targeting new dads. The reason dad jokes are great is they are the first jokes your kid understands. So I would think dads of 4 to 9 year-olds would be a better target.

The high you feel when your kid cracks up at some offhand dumb joke can’t be bottled.

But the reason I love this as a resourse is that explaining jokes to a curious child develops connections in their head in a way that only a parenting rolemodel can really do. So even if it’s not laugh-out-loud funny to explain a joke, if your child tells you that they do not get a joke, first and foremost realize that is a vunerable admission. Buddies will rag on you for not getting it. Parents see a gap in their kids’ world experience that they can fill.

Is this seriously your takeaway from a well-thought out post? This the smugness of reddit that I really don’t miss.

edit: I am refering to the root comment, as that isn’t clear.

It’s what percentage of countries have one that would matter.

It was just a dude answering questions he was asked. I don’t want to hang out with the guy.

I get a little worried about calling something like that “sexual assault”. It plays into the “can’t say anything anymore” crowd’s hands.

That wasn’t sexual assault. If you want a lesson to take away for what he actually did wrong here: he attacked the reason for rejection. It’s a natural thing to do. But that’s really the only thing wrong here.

Going in for a peck is fine. Planting one before they react wouldn’t be. But taking rejection gracefully is nearly impossible. Let’s try to be better.

It was stupid to use a kids show as an example. That episode aired in 2002. Only a small slice of people born 1980 to 2000 would care.

The other examples had an audience with a much wider age range.

And yet they had purple onions. Curious.

Never thought about it. In hindsight “not part of a maga agenda” makes for much better lyrics.

Ambiguity is fine. It would tedious to the point of distraction to enforce writing math without ambiguity. You make note of conventions and you are meant to realize that is just a convention. I’m amazed at the people who are planting their feet to fight for something that what they were taught in third grade as if the world stopped there.

You’re right though. We should definitely teach different conventions. But then what would facebook do for engagement?

When I went to college, I was given a reverse Polish notation calculator. I think there is some (albeit small) advantage of becoming fluent in both PEMDAS and RPN to see the arbitrariness. This kind of arguement is like trying to argue linguistics in a single language.

Btw, I’m not claiming that RPN has any bearing on the meme at hand. Just that there are different standards.

This comment is left by the HP50g crew.

I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.

Relevant xkcd alt-text 841.

For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.

I would be careful with the word “always”. A softlock can occur by entering a later dungeon to steal some of its keys. You can use the surplus keys to beat an early dungeon without collecting its item. This locks the item in the dungeon. Hope you didn’t need that later.

the fact that you basically have to read the manual

This is no joke and deserves a bit of emphasis. NES games expect you to read the manual.

I did my first play of Zelda 2 about 5 years ago. I didn’t like it as kid, but I loved my adult playthrough. I will note that this was one of the games that I got stuck until I read the manual.

Another Z2 pointer, to anyone that wants to give it a go, is that you can logically “soft lock” the game with bad key management. It’s unlikely, but if you like to look for unintended orders to do game goals, it could happen.

That’s a big egg. Of course, egg is just how you say oof when you remove the french language pack.