Plastic straw pollution doesn’t have a measurable impact on the environment.

The entire thing about banning plastic straws comes from some high schooler using back-of-a-napkin math to guess how many straws are in the ocean in what was clearly a successful attempt at starting a science fair project the night before it was due. Some news station picked it up, and then a bunch of science-illiterates ran away with it.

You can’t determine the impact of pollution by count. Straws are tiny and weigh almost nothing. If you skip buying one pair of sneakers in your life, then you’ve successfully reduced your plastic use by almost a lifetime of plastic straws.

Removing plastic straws is probably the single least impactful way to reduce plastic pollution. It’s pure virtue signaling: it’s about presenting an image of being environmentally conscious while doing effectively nothing to help the environment.

I learned to touch-type QWERTY in late 90s chat rooms. By 2006, I was bragging about my 100 WPM speed in my online dating profile. I met one girl who challenged me to a typing contest. She won, then I won, and then we called it a draw. We’ve been married for 13 years and had our third child last month.

When I was learning to touch type, I found it helpful to practice in my head even when I was away from the keyboard. Like whatever I’m thinking about, I’m picturing a keyboard in my head and where each letter of each word is. It slows my thoughts down a little, but that’s not always a bad thing.

Peanut butter, jelly, bread.

But if I’m doing it healthy, then add eggs, spinach, blueberries, yogurt.

Then why are they still paying me for it?

I wanted to be a writer or maybe an artist. I figured I had to do something creative and big, because I could never picture myself doing a normal 9-5 with a wife and kids or whatever. I was smart, but I was a bad student and couldn’t force myself to put in the work.

Turns out it was just undiagnosed ADHD. Now I work as a systems analyst (Excel guy) with a wife and two kids. Later today or tomorrow it’ll be three kids.

I’m lucky. My job is interesting sometimes, but mostly it’s easy and I get to spend the important parts of my day being a dad, which it turns out I love.

Sometimes I draw for fun as a creative outlet. I’ve made a few webcomics. I’m working on a longer comic for my daughter featuring a character she made up called “Princess Super Speed Girl”.

Exactly. I also try only to do verbs, although occasionally I verb nouns.

Regardless, the counter you check out at is the checkout counter, while the counter you check in at is the check-in counter. So OP does still have a point.

I just really, really like being with them. They’re sweet, they’re so smart, and they love me. I want to hang out with them. I want them to come to the grocery store with me. I want to play games and have tickle fights and sing silly songs with them.

But my favorite thing is probably how funny they are. I write some of it down. Most of these happened when they were three.

“Did somebody draw us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like before we were real. Did somebody draw us to make us real?”

My son sees numbers painted on the sidewalk and asks if they’re letters:

“ABCDEFG. Is that from that?”

“What if it was someone’s birthday when they already passed away? That would be sad. Then they wouldn’t be able to eat their cake.”

My wife helps my son to use the potty, and she takes off his jacket first:

“Mommy, did you forget where my penis is? Did you think it’s up here? It’s not. It’s down here.”

After I read my daughter Rikki Tikki Tavi, which features a snake named Nag:

Daughter: “Nag is tall. Nag is as long as you are tall.”

Wife: “Is he five feet long? I’m five feet tall” Daughter: “Snakes don’t have feet”

When searching for the opposite of “inside out”, instead of saying “right side in” my daughter called it “un-inside out”, which I think actually makes more sense.

“You need to behave.”

“Ok. I’m being have.”

Finishing a long conversation with the cat:

“Next time I’m going to teach you to say words.”

My third child will most likely be born this week, and the thing I’m looking forward to most is late night feedings. People complain about those and I can’t sympathize. I love them.

There’ll be a day when I’d give anything to go back and relive those moments, holding my baby at 2am, singing them to sleep. It’s a perfect moment.

I was never that big on the idea of kids before I had them. I deeply, deeply value my independence. But this is good too.

I’m fairly confident they didn’t know. I’d be willing to bet the vast, vast majority of people don’t know what that word means.

When I was a kid I’d get a new stuffed animal, and somewhere on the tag it would say, “Made from all new material”.

And for some reason I thought that meant the material had just been developed or discovered. Like they had a team of scientists in a lab working on a new type of polyester just so they could use it to make this shitty stuffed lemon that I won at a church carnival.

Thirty years later I realized it probably just meant the materials weren’t recycled.

Honestly frozen can be fine. My kids love frozen broccoli and cauliflower. You still have to prepare it right though.

But I’m pretty sure even the frozen veggies are better now than they were back then.

In the 80s my family still got most of our vegetables from cans. It was bad.

Stranger in a Strange Land. I was told I’d like it because it was critical of religion, but it turns out it was only critical of organized religion. Too specific for my tastes.

Maduro cheating comes from the same people that said the US 2020 election was rigged

Do you have a source for that? Because from what I can tell, the exact opposite is true, and the sources for these two claims are generally opposed to each other.

Lego.

There’s something about it that’s just so satisfying to me. Putting every piece in exactly its right place. I got into it as a kid, kept it up until college.

A few years ago I started getting into it again. At first it was just the Marvel sets, but then I got a couple of castle ones. I still love it as much as I did back then, except now I can share it with my kids.

I like “Sneeze Louise!”

Me too!

Honestly I’d probably give it another shot if they just made the Master Sword unbreakable. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s Link’s main weapon in other games.

But they’re all in on this temporary weapon gameplay loop. And I get that; I understand that sometimes it can be a good thing to push the player into playing the game a certain way. Except they already did that for most of the game. If the Master Sword were unbreakable, you’d still have plenty of players doing the constant weapon swapping, but you’d also have a few more players like me actually playing the game. I’d probably even swap weapons most of the time, secure in the knowledge that I still had a weapon that wouldn’t break when I need it.

Plus how good is your gameplay loop if you have to force it on the player?

But I know I’m in the minority on this. It’s weird to see people loving a Zelda game more than I do, because for 30 years of my life that would never have been the case. Hopefully they return to the old formula for the next game.

I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.

For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.

Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I’m just trading off weapons that I don’t like for more weapons that I don’t like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.

I didn’t even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It’s a feel-bad mechanic, and I’d rather not do it.

For me: weapon durability.

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