scandinavegan

MSG was heavily discussed in Sweden 10-15 years ago, especially the addition to potato chips. The Swedish National Food Agency said that it was safe to eat, but that some people may be hypersensitive.

I read a couple of articles now, and it seems from interviews like the people behind some of the organizations protesting its use was hypersensitive themselves. It makes sense that if they have bad reactions, they assume that the substance itself is bad in general, even if that hasn't been shown in medical trials. The Food Agency also said that since the symptoms were limited in time and severity, even if hypersensitive (blurred vision, headache, and so on) it wasn't necessary to warn the general public to stop consumption.

I read an article saying that MSG is not allowed in baby food and is cautioned against for pregnant women. The baby food claim may be true, but the Food Agency says that small children process MSG as efficiently as adults, that there's no difference of glutamate blood concentration between fetus and mother when pregnant, and that MSG is not considered a risk for the fetus. They also say that it's not probable that it's transferred to the baby in breast milk, if consumption is kept at recommended daily intake.

When I was in elementary school in the 80s and 90s, people would eat knäckebröd [1] with butter covered with Aromat [2]. We didn't know it then, but it contained MSG which was probably why it tasted so good.

Aromat contains lactose, and a vegan alternative is Vegeta [3]. I don't sprinkle it directly onto food, even if I could, but use it more like powdered broth and add it to sauces and soups. It's pretty salty, so I use it instead of salt.

Another vegan product I'd like to mention for its umami flavor is Engevita [4] nutritional yeast flakes. I sprinkle that on top of food which gives it a more deep, nutty, or cheesy flavor. Instead of monosodium glutamate, where a sodium atom is bound to the glutamate amino acid, the glutamate is bound (according to an article I read that was light on details) to other amino acids, but still performs its umami duties. This is natural occurring glutamate in the yeast, and not an additive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispbread

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromat

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podravka#Consumer_brands

[4] http://marigoldhealthfoods.co.uk/products/engevita/engevita-...

I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I struggle with procrastination.

Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?

It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.

For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.

With a counter full of dirty dishes, I tell myself that I'll just quickly fill the dishwasher with the easy stuff and start it. I'll leave the rest for later. But when I've started the dishwasher, there's usually only three items left, like a soft plastic lid or a tea mug that can't go in the dishwasher. So I wash those by hand. Now the counter is empty, but stained, so I might as well wipe it so that it's clean for next time I cook.

It all starts with the lazy "I'll just throw the easy stuff into the dishwasher", but momentum takes over. Listening to interesting podcasts help!

My trick to start emails is to add To and Cc last, when I'm happy with the email.

If I add them first, I worry that I'll click send by mistake halfway through my draft (and a secondary worry is that the draft will be full of inappropriate stuff and curse words, which I never add even to drafts, so it's not a rational thought). If I add the recipients first, it also feels like they sit there looking at me expectantly as I write, which makes it harder.

An email not addressed to anyone, but of course with the recipients in mind to adapt the content, makes it easier for me to treat the first version as a draft.

Sleeping on non-urgent emails sounds like an excellent idea, because your view of the issue may change.

So cheat! If you use a physical calendar, you can mark those days with another symbol, like an arrow to show that the chain carries on. If you use an app, you can mark the day anyway, knowing that you had a legitimate reason to skip it.

Think of all the benefits you would get from practicing 95% of the days marked, compared to a much lower percent without the chain. Don't let the 5% or 1% stop you.

As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!

That said, I can't do chains. I get anxious after a while carrying a long streak, and will either conveniently forget a day and mess up the streak (and feel relieved), or decide during a streak that I'll stop at 30, or 100, or whatever, just to give me permission to get off the treadmill. I don't like when enjoyable things turn into a chore.

Some apps are nice and let you go back and add marks even if you forgot to do it on the day. Some apps, like Duolingo, let you unlock tokens that protect your streak if you miss a day. But some apps are really strict, which can be annoying if you finish something after midnight and realize that you just broke the chain. My wife had that with a writing app where she finished exactly at midnight, which counted for the next day and her streak was broken.

So if I did a chain, I'd use a text file, or a paper, or send myself an email a day logging that I did the task. I wouldn't trust an extremely rigid app, because, as you say, there can be legitimate reasons why you miss.

Also, coffee beans are not beans, but the pit (that usually comes in two parts) of the coffee fruit. It's the same with cocoa beans, but with 30-50 seeds per fruit.

I agree with everything you said. I have a couple of theories from a Swedish perspective.

First, and the most vague, is the idea of competent children in Sweden. I read an article recently (in the Swedish newspaper DN[1]) that traced a line through the author Ellen Key -> Astrid Lindgren and Rune Andréasson -> Pippi Longstocking and Bamse (comic book bear), and the idea that just because you're young doesn't mean that you're not competent. Both Pippi and Bamse talk directly to children (and the parents who read them to their children) and tell them about injustices and the idea that even a child can do things on an adult level.

This idea has been involved in the creation of preschools throughout the whole 20th century in Sweden. The newspaper article says that's why it's not surprising that Greta Thunberg is from Sweden, because you can't discount what someone does or says just because they're a child.

Also part of the preschool movement in Sweden was the idea that play is important for children. The DN article quotes the sisters Moberg who started the first Swedish preschool in 1904 as saying: "The child that plays a lot and with intensity, will surely become a competent human."

So children are expected to play and be children, but when they do and say things, they have been taught that it carries equal weight as what an adult does. It's a powerful idea that when children play (and I include teenagers playing video games or programming here, because a lot of parents would view it as playing), they're not just wasting time, but actively engaging in activities that will be useful for them in later life.

My idea is that young people in Sweden, as in many places, in the 80s and early 90s had a lot of unstructured free time. You weren't expected to have a lot of extra-curricular activities in Sweden, it was school, than do what you want.

(As an aside, unstructured free time has shrunk and is shrinking rapidly for children in Sweden, as well as elsewhere in the world. We now have organized play dates, soccer practice and swimming lessons and piano lessons, and so on. We had that in the 80s too, but the intensity is way up. What used to be one or two driven kids per school class is now the norm, so as a parent you have to fight to keep your kid's schedule free.)

What a lot of Swedish kids had was home computers! Here's where the earlier idea about competent children comes in, because a lot of parents would buy this machine and expect the kids to figure them out. Contrasting the C64 and Amiga 500 with ROM based systems like Atari 2600 and NES (NES was also huge in Sweden), the home computers required you to get more involved in how things worked when starting or copying games. They also came with Basic programming books, and taught you how to do a bouncing ball on screen, change the color of the ball, and so on. Pretty much a very basic demoscene tutorial.

It's hard to find exact sales number, but some articles say that the Commodore 64 sold 100 000 units in Sweden, and another article says that the Amiga 500 sold a lot better than the C64, and that the Amiga sold 100 000 units. Another article said that in the US, the Amiga 500 only sold 50 000 units in the first year, which was a disappointment. Comparing the populations of the US and Sweden in 1985 directly, without taking into account GDP, poverty levels, and so on, the US should sell 30 times the number of units as Sweden, all else being equal.

So per capita, a lot more young people would have a C64 and later an Amiga 500 in Sweden, both being primary computers used by the demoscene. The graphic and sound capabilities of the C64 and Amiga 500 made the demos possible.

Games for both computers were distributed on cheap cassettes and floppy disks. Pirated, because hardly any kids could afford to buy games at the store. So people had hundreds of pirated games on cassette and floppy disk, and usually the team that cracked it would put a short animation in the beginning bragging about cracking the game. This was the start of the demoscene, and they obviously had a lot of viewers.

Everyone I knew either had a C64 or Amiga or knew someone first hand who did. It was easy for anyone interested to follow a friend home after school to play games. And we all saw the cracker team demos, and were impressed by the star fields, rotating text, and chiptune music, so it's easy to see how someone could have become interested in doing that themselves, and started their own demo group.

I think that your final side note on the difference between the UK and Scandinavia is correct as well. I don't remember at all being worried about law enforcement getting involved with C64 and Amiga piracy in Sweden. This may have been because I was a kid and didn't read the news, but I think that the distance from the game producers, as you say, was involved. I don't even know if most of the teams who cracked the games were based in Sweden, or Germany or the UK, but I know that a lot of kids saw the cracker group intros in Sweden and went on to do full-length demos.

Personally, I still vividly remember the awe I felt when an older cousin showed me the State of the Art demo[2] on Amiga on my grandmother's TV in mid 90s. A bit later I saw the first Doom and thought that it was totally photo realistic.

[1] https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ingen-greta-utan-pippi-och-bam...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 (edit: I looked up now that the demo group Spaceballs was from Norway)

I read the Hobbit to my daughter when she was 4 and to my son when he was 6, both closer to 5 and 7. I aimed for 10 pages a night of a pocket edition we have, which meant 25-30 nights or so.

My daughter got really scared with the giant spiders in the forest and wanted to quit, but I managed to convince her to go on. She was happy we did because everything turned out fine in the end. She was bored by the battle at the end of the book, but we got through it.

It's hard to know how much of the story my son understood. I usually reminded him what happened last time every time we started ("They were walking through the forest, remember?" or "Last time, they just reached the mountain!"). The individual parts are easy enough to understand, I think.

They both loved the riddle game with Gollum, and it sparked (or fed) an interest in riddles in both. It's an excellent book when you want to take the step up from children's books.

> And the actual menus in that game were terrible... really hard to control and you'd give up and go looking for the controller.

I have Ring Fit for the Nintendo Switch. You attach one controller to the physical ring that you can push or pull, rotate or flick up and down. You can use ring motions to control menus, and even if I think it registers fine, it's much more convenient to use the controller.

I'm so happy that they kept that as an option, and I always use the attached controller rather than flipping the ring around. It's just quicker and more convenient.

I agree with your main point! I want to state that upfront so that you don't think I'm arguing about the current situation, apart from addressing specifics.

You will have to add some time to flying scenario. You have to arrive early to the airport to go through security (2 hours?), you have to wait for your luggage after landing (30 minutes?), and since airports are usually located outside of the city center you have to add travel time to and from the airport (45 minutes in each direction?). In my example that's an extra 4 hours added to the 2 hours time flying.

It's still a lot less than going by train, but with train you get the convenience of being able to run onto the platform 2 minutes before departure, you end up in the city center, you pick up your luggage and leave, and you usually have more space which makes it easier to work on the train if needed.

Also, flying is extremely subsidized and tax-exempt. I just read articles (in Swedish, so I don't know if anyone wants links) claiming that air tickets should be between 50% and 95% more expensive if they had to carry their own costs, if there was a tax on airplane fuel, and so on. So the price for air tickets probably doesn't reflect their real costs, and obviously doesn't take the environmental effect into account.

But even adding the extra time and extra cost, it would still be faster and cheaper to fly than to take the train, which is unfortunate from an environmental perspective. I wish we had faster trains, and a lot more overnight trains so that you could start your travel in the evening and wake up in a new city. It wouldn't help with a 40 hour trip, because it would still be two nights with one full day on the train.

This might work for people who can work remotely on the train, but not for everyone. Start you journey on Thursday night, work Friday on the train, and arrive Saturday morning at the destination. Someone I know did this recently while traveling to a conference, and the company obviously paid for the tickets. This doesn't help when visiting family, but for work travel, train could be an option.

I have an airplane interested colleague and I asked him about environmental fuels. He said that aviation biofuel already exists, and it's just a question of adoption and scale. A carbon dioxide tax might push air companies towards biofuel, or you could have the option of green biofuel departures and let the customers decide if they think it's worth the extra cost. I'm sure my train-traveling conference goer would consider that option if it was available.

As I said, I agree with your main point that if you just look at price and travel time today, the less environmentally friendly option makes more sense. It would make more sense if the slower option was also much, much cheaper than flying, because that would encourage more people to use that option.

Nice puzzle game!

It reminds me of Lines X for Nintendo Switch that I really enjoy. [1]

For me, I would have preferred even less text than currently in the tutorial. If you look at the image on the first Lines X page I link below of the two turquoise dots, that's the first page of that tutorial. No text at all. You have to connect the two dots by swiping. The next tutorial screen has some extra black dots, and you learn that you have to cover all black dots with your line as well, not only connect the colored dots. Though I have to say, my mother couldn't figure that step out in Lines X without my help, even when she's into different types of puzzles, so it can be argued that having no text will only appeal to more hardcore users.

But something similar could be done in your game. I didn't need the text in the first tutorial screen, because the 4 and the empty squares would make me swipe to see what happens, and I can at a maximum cover 4 squares in any direction. Also, the line changes color when you reach the correct number of squares, which is plenty information that this is the intended length. On the second screen, I don't need text to tell me lines can't overlap, because the tutorial won't advance until I create the correct solution.

I would allow a bit more trial and error from the user instead of explanatory text. The minimalism can be taken further. That way you can learn the game and figure out the rules at the same time.

Here are some suggestions, that you can use if you wish:

1. Hide the text in the tutorial by adding the text "help" next to "quit" in the bottoma of the UI, or a question mark somewhere. The first tutorial page should (according to me) just be the puzzle! Clicking help would show the text and the heading "Welcome to Ordinary Puzzle" and so on, and clicking help again would hide all text from the page.

2. Consider showing currently solved and the maximum number of puzzles of each size. For example:

small 3/100

medium 0/100

large 0/100

That way the player gets an estimation of how large the game is, and it might encourage players to finish more puzzles. Or if the number of puzzles are automatically generated and infinite in number, a would like to know how many I've finished of each size.

3. Clicking the number and stars in the top right should lead to a progress page or at least an explanation of stars. Currently I don't know what "38" means after solving a couple of puzzles. It would make more sense to me if it said the number of finished puzzles, but right now I don't know what the number means. Total number of squares with lines in finished puzzles? I just finished a new puzzle and it says "+27", but I don't know what the 27 stars are from.

4. After finishing a puzzle, I don't need the screen that shows the puzzle name and having to click "new puzzle". I'd like the game to automatically start the next puzzle, possible after showing the puzzle name and "completed", which would make me finish more of them in succession. If I want to stop playing, I can click quit from the next puzzle, I don't need to be asked between every puzzle.

5. I agree with the other poster who wanted to start from any square, where the line would be tossed if it doesn't connect to a number. On the other hand, I can definitely view the current implementation as a slight quirk of the game, and accept the way it works. It doesn't take much away from the game the way it is, and it reinforces that you have to interact with the numbers in some way and not just swipe randomly. So having the numbers start each interaction makes sense from that perspective.

[1]

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/lines-x-switch/

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/06/lines_x_is_a_relax...

> We are a bit anti-authority, I think it is hard to deny this trait. We don't like being bossed around but that's not systematic or unavoidable: we just want to follow orders we respect. So in France, you almost never give orders to someone without explaining the why (and complain about the clueless boss/client that made this order a necessity). Give us a good reason, the first answer will be yes.

This is interesting. I'm Swedish, and in a previous job I had a series of meetings with a French hardware design team. We were taught internally before the meeting, and it seemed to be confirmed during the meeting, that the French would be much more hierarchical than what we were used to, and that the French designers wouldn't contradict their manager in the meeting. If the manager said something, the designers would defend it, even if incorrect.

Contrast that with the typically flat organizations of a Swedish company, and where a designer would be expected to correct a manager in a meeting if they said something incorrect, otherwise you're letting the manager down. If you know that something can't be done, for example, and have more information than the manager, you're expected to say something. All of my managers would have been upset if I let them look like a fool in a meeting by making decisions with incomplete information, if I knew something that could help them. Both of us would lose status by me not saying anything, rather than both losing status by me piping up during the meeting.

That's not to say that the Swedish culture is perfect! A lot of people I've worked with from abroad are annoyed by the consensus culture that everyone here has to agree on everything. That can mean long times where no one seems to make a decision, and a decision can be revisited and flipped because someone later disagrees. I can see how it can be frustrating to never know for sure if something is decided or not, and that it can feel like managers don't take their responsibility if they want the whole group to make most decisions together. Or, the decision can be unclear to someone from a different culture, because the Swedish manager thought that the group reached consensus without the actual decision having to be spelled out.

> Finally, make a trip to India and do meet your remote team members.

I'm from Sweden, and a Swedish colleague met a team that visited from India. Half-way through the meeting she had to stop and ask why the Indian team were shaking their heads. It turns out it was a head bobble or Indian head shake.[1]

My colleague thought that they kept signalling "no, no, no" by shaking their heads while she was speaking, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. I'm very happy my colleague stopped and asked, because a lot of people would stay silent and keep their misconceptions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble

Growth and meaning in video games doesn't only have to be due to the storylines. There's also mastery, like playing Tetris and becoming better and better, or fighting Dark Souls bosses without taking damage.

In the Dark Souls community there are many challenge runs, for example finishing the game without leveling up your character, or by using only unupgraded starting weapons. When you play the games for the first time, you struggle even with a fully upgraded character and weapon, but after a while you don't need them. This gives a great sense of accomplishment.

Another need, related to mastery, is competition and overcoming opponents. When you start out playing Rocket League or Fortnite, you usually don't do very well. But as you play more, you become better and can do more things in game. Each new personal level of skill has its own challenges. Some people actively use the practice mode in the games to improve certain mechanics, others just play a lot of matches and improve that way. I would view a (to you, not compared to the pros) perfect Rocket League goal as something expressing both artistry, skill mastery, and an expression of your personal playing style. If you want to become good at either game, you also need intellectual growth, because you need to read guides online or watch YouTube videos to learn how to do new things, and then you try it in game until you learned them yourself.

Actually, even though they get critisised a lot because of loot boxes, skins in online multiplayer games also serve as personal artistic expressions. Designing an 80s-themed Rocket League car, or a car as disgusting-looking or silly-looking as possible, and showing it off to your teammates and opponents is definitely an expression of your person.

Also, to me, no one needs to see your creations for them to be artistic personal expressions. If your hobby is to draw or write short stories, that's a way for you to express yourself even if you never show them to anyone. It's the same with your house in Minecraft.

Thank you for all the examples! I've read the book, but don't have all of it in active memory, so I appreciate your list as it helped me remember different parts. I have to look up the mold-eating part because I remember it as hilarious.

Three other more or less absurd parts of the book that I enjoyed was the (apparently true) concept of different sized arms of tennis players, subsidized time (Year of the Whopper, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and how half a state in the US is turned into a giant landfill that waste is catapulted into.

The two things I remember vividly from reading the book is how funny it is, and how it would take me a page or two in the beginning of each session to get into the rhythm of the language. It's similar to Cormac McCarthy (I currently read Blood Meridian), where the special cadence of the language makes both IJ and BM very pleasurable to read.

https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...

I haven't read it in detail, and I don't know how difficult it is, but there's a free book on how to (among other things) automate Office applications with Python:

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

Chapter 12-14 look relevant to you (Excel, Word, and CSV).

> Allowing ourselves to fail (and learn and have fun) is a powerful thing.

I agree completely, and it changed my life to realize this as an adult. I try to teach my kids that it's OK to enter practice mode when they do things that are hard (video games, drawing, homework) and that it's OK to fail as long as they learn or at least have fun.

For me it was the video games Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne that taught me to fail and press on. I had a fixed mindset before, and would mostly do things that came easy to me. In DS3 the bosses, and even regular enemies, can kill you with a couple of blows, but if you figure out their movesets you can easily counter them.

The first time you meet a new boss you have to be prepared to die a couple of times (or 10 or 50) as you learn their attacks and how they're telegraphed, before you can defeat them. A common suggestion is to not at first even try to attack a difficult boss, but to just dodge and study their moves before they inevitable defeat you. Then you apply that knowledge the next time you try.

I've come to the point where I feel cheated if I beat a boss at the first attempt, because you don't get to experience the full range of the boss and you don't get the same high as when you finally beat them.

DS3 and Bloodborne has made me better at video games in general, and I think better at being persistent outside of games.

Another thing is watching people practice speedruns of video games. They fail over, and over, over again, and I greatly admire the players that can just restart that section of the game and practice over and over. I hate speedrunners that rage at the game, but absolutely love the calm ones that just keep trying until they can reliably beat a difficult stage.

Bits of meat sticking to the vegan burger would be a big no-no for me and the vegans that I know!

I'm not personally bothered by using the same tools to handle both meat and vegan options, as long as I can't taste it, if we're talking about backyard barbecuing with friends. But I expect more from a company.

I had an unpleasant experience a couple of years ago at Subway. I ordered a vegan sub, and the person behind the counter asked if I wanted them to switch their plastic gloves. "No need," I said, because I thought it was a moral question. But when I started eating the sub I could smell meat along the whole bread as I ate it. It was not pleasant when it was two decades since I last had meat, but I was drunk and hungry and finished it anyway.

Pronouncing the sound is one thing, spelling it is another.

Here's a (probably non-exhaustive) list of 65 different variants. The article in Swedish, but it should be possible to understand the list:

https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&art...

Edit: I don't know of any rules for when to use which spelling. When I was a kid, I just learned how the different words were spelled individually, even though the sound is the same. Same thing when I'm teaching my kids: "Sju (seven) is spelled like this, schack (chess) is spelled like this, charmig (charming) is spelled like this", and so on.

Short-term focus is why I fell in love with and still use Leo Babauta's GTD-related idea of MITs (Most Important Tasks). See links at bottom.

Each morning I set 3 tasks (sometimes 4 or 5 if I absolutely have to and they're small) that would make me feel good about the day if I finish. I write them in an otherwise empty text document, order them by importance, and start working on the first one.

These tasks can be large or small, sometimes even just "send this email" that will take 15 minutes to write, but is really important to send off. This also works great when working from home, because even if the environment is different, I can still feel productive if I at least finish those 3 things.

If I finish the 3 things early, I assess my energy level and either finish the day with organizing emails or reading up on stuff or other low-effort tasks, or I tackle one last MIT if I feel up for it. The point is to prioritize short-term focus of the 3 MITs instead of looking at the potentially endless list of todos I could keep picking from all through the day.

MIT: https://zenhabits.net/purpose-your-day-most-important-task/

Zen to Done: https://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-pr...

How many eggs would each person get to eat per year using that production method? We surely wouldn't be able to keep boiling them, frying them, using them in most baked goods, and so on, because production would drop to a fraction of what it currently is.

I'm vegan, and on my honeymoon we went to a place where hens ran around free in the villages and would crawl underneath bushes to sleep for the night. Even I wouldn't see any ethical problems with humans grabbing unfertilized eggs they found under bushes each morning, but as I said, how many people would that feed?

It's the same as me having much less of a problem with hunting than I do factory farming, because a bullet and instant death, or at least within a couple of minutes, is a much better life for the animal than factory farming. But if we limited meat eating to only that being hunted, people would get to eat a small fraction of the meat they eat today.

Or rather, price would probably be so high that only the most well-off could afford the eggs and meat in that world. If you're in that group you might still get eggs and meat, otherwise not. Still, people who use these two examples as ethical ways of getting eggs and meat must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.

Also, as of 2013, 98% of hens in the US was in cages, and 2% free-range:

https://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/5235021/Statistics-Laying-hens...

In the EU, it was 60% cage, 25% barn, 12% free-range, and 3% organic. At least for Sweden, free-range can still be indoors, but organic requires access to the outside. So even moving only to current free-range eggs would mean a drastic reduction of consumption.

Apple did this in 2018 when two movies bought on iTunes were removed from a user. After contacting support the user was offered two vouchers for rental movies, which is obviously worth less.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/13/apple-is-...

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-res...

Another anime series that asks big questions is Serial Experiments Lain.

It's about a young girl who gets into computers and learns about a parallel world of networked communication called the Wired. The Wired is like VR/AR/internet/chat rooms all in one.

It's only 13 episodes, so it's not a huge time investment, but really interesting. It covers computer hackers, Vannevar Bush's Memex, and more. It's also a bit like a David Lynch story, as it has its own dream logic that doesn't always correspond to what you expect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain

I've read articles that say that when they stress-test fighter pilots by having them do cognitive test while wearing headphones with different sounds, they usually mix in infants crying. It's one of the most distracting things for a person to hear.

For me, it wasn't when the kids started crying that was the most stressful, but when they wouldn't stop. You check their diapers, you check if they're hungry, you rock them gently, and even then sometimes they just wouldn't stop crying. After a while the noise would be so bad that I had to hand them off to my wife, and she did the same when she became too frustrated.

Funnily enough, it made me immune to other kids crying. Before I had kids I would get very irritated at noisy kids or crying infants in the subway. Now, I'm just happy it's not my kids and that it's someone else's problem!

That's an interesting thought!

The Dark Souls series of video games are known to be hard, especially the bosses. Many people, myself included, have experienced being stuck on a boss and after 20 attempts they give up for the night. Next time you start the game up you beat the boss on the first attempt!

It's hard to know if this is because your subconscious mind kept working on the problem, or if new neural pathways were formed to handle the eye-hand coordination, or, as you suggest, you just came back to the problem refreshed.

Being refreshed, and not frustrated and tired, seems like the simplest explanation for this.

Could be, or I have an over-protective Firefox. I still have the same issue with the link.

I get a scary-looking warning in Firefox when I click that link. It says:

"Someone could be trying to impersonate the site and you should not continue.

Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust danielvaughn.github.io because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates.

Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER"

To continue to your site, I'd have to click the button "Accept the Risk and Continue", which not everyone will do. I just want you to know in case you want to look into it.

No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him.

I have the same situation with my six-year old son and Rocket League loot boxes. He wants to spend all his limited money on them, I think he's wasting it, especially since I see the disappointment when he doesn't get the things he want, but that's a learning experience. It's worse when he once in a while gets a cool skin, because in his eyes it makes it all worth it.

I see the money I give him as teaching opportunities. Kids will get in touch with these mechanics as they grow up, and now you have the chance to talk to him about it. Discuss it over and over, it's not a one-time thing, and you've made no permanent damage. Let him know you think it's not worth it, but I wouldn't put a permanent ban on it, as it may make it even more appealing. If he wants other (real-life) stuff later, remind him that he already spent his money on loot boxes and I think they will lose their appeal a bit.

In the first picture, is that from an actual Lego City set, or has someone added the revolver to the police officer from another set?

The BrickLink page lists the revolver as part of a bunch of western and cavalry sets, that is, historical sets. Click "Item Appears In: 7 Sets" to the right.

I still don't see it. There are sci-fi guns like blasters, historical guns like flintlocks, and there are guns used in superhero sets, but nothing for Lego City or any other set that claims to represent real life.