Yeah, I get that. My confusion steams from the use of “sleepwalking” as opposed to another word choice like “traveling.” In my mind it creates an expectation that being asleep will be a component of the pun-chline that I’m not seeing. This makes the joke feel half-finished to me. Am I missing something, or am I just overthinking it?

What’s the difference between $10 billion in printed money sitting in the federal reserve for such a fund and printing $10 billion dollars on the spot? Neither is affecting the economy until it leaves the federal reserve.

I get the roamin’/Roman pun for the walking of sleepwalking. But, much like astronomy class, the rest is going right over my head. What else am I missing here? How does Catholic tie into sleeping?

So am I to assume there was more to the story that didn’t click with you than the optional narrative sub-branch that you chose not to engage with?

Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?

I think using the term “peaked in high school” is about as problematic a term as “former gifted kid” is. It sells a false narrative that there can be only one peak in a person’s life. I should know, because I am a former gifted kid who definitely had a strong peak in high school. I passed all 8 of the AP exams I took, was captain of the tennis team, and prom king. I don’t know I can say I could do all of that being who I am now, which does make me feel a little lesser than I was. But then I take off the nostalgia glasses and remember all of the pressure I was under from everywhere around me to accomplish those things, and the insecurity leading me to obsess over books and video games to escape life. That leads me to remember the feelings of burnout and inability I had to cope with life when those pressure sources were no longer present, and how much I have grown in dealing with those.

My point in saying all that is to show that, given only that info, I exactly fit the description of what you’re saying. And if that is all you know about me, maybe you’d think that you’re right, but I’ve had several peaks since then, all of them different. I could wax poetic over my first real relationship, and if that was all I said to you you might think “God, this guy needs to get over it, he definitely peaked in his first relationship.” But I didn’t because this thread is about “former gifted kids,” so that’s all you’ll read about when you enter it.

Memes are typically about one topic and one topic only, and assuming that the topic of a meme is all there is to the person posting it is (to put it nicely) kinda silly.

Is that EU picture supposed to look more aesthetically appealing than the US one? Because I flip a switch on the US panel and feel super serious, like Kurt Russell about to flip the switch on all power on Earth. I look at the EU picture and think of the electrical outlets behind the teacher’s desk in the 80 year old school building I attended.

If you go back far enough, there’s a lot of Scandinavian heritage in Minnesota settlers, especially Sweden and Norway. Historically, Scandinavian foods lacked spice because there weren’t a lot of spices that grew there. The settlers brought the palette that comes with that with them.

I suppose it tells you that there is no male equivalent. I do think it’s interesting that there are so many fewer types of admission skewed toward women that fit the criteria of being skewed by 80% or more, especially when you consider the prominence of pregnancy related types.

I do also think it would be more interesting to see something like the top 15 admission types for men and top 15 for women without the 80% threshold requirement to get a wider spread of women-skewed admissions.

Instantly? It’s a somewhat vague term, but magnanimity, having “loftiness of spirit.” To me, it means that when they enter a room they carry a subtle gravity. Their eyes are focused on what and who is around them, taking in each in turn with a clear understanding of what they see but a respect for what they don’t. A trim smile that welcomes greetings and promises warm words in return. They breathe with the calm ease of someone healthy and comfortable in their own skin, and with each step they appear to not just approach their physical destination, but their own personal fulfillment.

I liked Stacy’s Mom when I first heard it, but after listening to more and Fountains of Wayne over the years, it just makes me angry because it’s the only song of theirs anybody knows! I like that most of their music is about everyday moments and emotions, but the only everyday moment people know is the milf one.

And then I start thinking about Bowling for Soup’s cover of Stacy’s Mom, which is by far the worst cover I have ever heard, not because it’s bad in its own right, but because there are no creative decisions taken, nothing to make it their own, they just do nothing with it and on Spotify it has an entire half of the number of plays as the original. The first time I heard the cover, I didn’t realize until the singing started and I thought the voice sounded a little different. And there are people who don’t even realize Bowling for Soup’s “version” is a cover!

You, me, and everyone else are the amalgamations and culminations of our individual life experiences. You don’t have to remember the details for those details to have happened and influenced you at the time.

I understand your concerns after having my first concussion almost two years ago now and unvaccinated covid three years before that. Both affected my cognitive state and speed of thinking/remembering, and I’ve wondered/worried how much weaker my mind may be than it could have been. But ultimately what I tell myself is that I can’t change those things, they’re just another thing that led me to now. All I can do is the best with what I have and trust that it will be enough.

But that’s just living with the doom and gloom. I think you may be surprised at what you do remember but can’t recall unprompted. One time I lost the game (I lost the game, sorry) around a friend of a friend who paused for a moment then exclaimed that it had been 15 or 20 years since he last thought about the game. So for all that time one could think he had forgotten, but as soon as something triggered his memory, it was there. Based on that, I advise that you trust that if you have a relevant memory, it will surface at the time it is relevant. Some level of self-reflection is good, but don’t let the reinforcement of old brain connections in memory stand in the way of forming new ones.

I feel like doing research shouldn’t be an issue for people playing Paradox games, where it takes hours of research in the tooltips just to understand the mechanics.

That said, my research for new Paradox DLC usually consists of hovering over it in the store, ignoring anything with reviews less than mixed, taking interest in those with positive, and reading the first dozen reviews of the mixed ones, and that works well enough.

Honestly pretty relatable. I had a bit of a “you’ll shoot your eye out” moment this summer. I got some flower for the first time in a while (it’s mostly a thc drink culture around me) and was smoking daily. For the next couple weeks the thought kept crossing my mind that maybe I should only smoke every other day to keep my tolerance creep slow and prevent what I call “zombie mode.”

I got to meet one of my favorite youtubers whose first video I had watched was this one “On Weed:” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pcavwJitC4

We talked a little and I asked if he still smokes. His answer? “Yeah, but only every other day.” To hear him echo the exact thing I had been considering internally really got me. I’ve been a lot better about keeping a day or more between getting high, and I have found that it has helped me enjoy being sober more as I have found things to do while sober, and also increased my enjoyment of getting high as I have more time to look forward to it and a lower tolerance that makes it easier to get to the right level.

I highly recommend it.

Well, I guess I’ll just disagree. It very much reads to me as someone looking back and realizing they got everything they had been trying to get “by mistake” when they stopped trying to get it.

I think I can forgive someone using the language of their past self when reflecting upon that past. In the context of the paragraph, I think it’s fair to say that “which worked” means something more along the lines of “and things did get better.” Maybe he could have improved his word choice in that instance, but I don’t think that negates everything else said.

I can already hear you saying “but that’s not what he said, and that was his choice of words.” And to that, I point to one of the key lessons I learned in college philosophy: questions of meaning come before questions of truth. In this case where one short two word sentence does not fit the rest of what he is saying, I think it’s best to ask what they could mean that would fit.

No, over text they might sound similar, but in person it’s easier to see that the difference is between being performative in his niceness as a means to have friends/a girlfriend versus being nice as a means toward being his better self, with friends following naturally from that.

What I believe Wildbus8979 is implying is trying to get the person they responded to to understand is “if cops are this bad outside the US, and US cops are worse, then yes US cops can be that bad.” Could they have clarified or spelled that out more? Sure. Could you have thought out your understanding of their words a little more than your initial reaction that they weren’t discussing the US? Sure.

I live around the Twin Cities metro of Minnesota (two cities split by a river), which installed its first passenger light rail about 20 years ago. I recently moved from the north suburbs to the south side of town. I was very excited to be able to drive 10 minutes east on the freeway to my buddy’s house within walking distance of a station to take the 10 minute light rail ride downtown for a basketball game. Previously I would have driven 20-40 minutes (depending on traffic congestion) to pay $20 to use a parking ramp because the light rail doesn’t extend north.

Over the last 20 years they have extended the rail between the airport/Mall of America on the south side to the downtown of one city, and connected that downtown to the downtown of the other city across the river. If you live anywhere north of the city proper, or more than a few miles away from the one line running south, there is little reason to use the rail system over driving the whole way. If you do though, it’s pretty great.

That’s just been my experience, my understanding is some larger cities (Chicago and NYC are what come to mind) have more robust rail systems, but many cities (mine at least) have limited access for most people living in them.

The Bowling for Soup cover is the worst cover of a song I have ever heard. Not because it’s bad, but because it takes the original song and does absolutely nothing with it. The first time someone put it on near me it took me a full 30 seconds of confusion to realize that the song sounded wrong because the singer was different.

A good cover involves an artist taking a work from another artist and making it their own, with a different tone, pace, etc. The Bowling for Soup version does none of that.