Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Tyranexx I wasn't fond of my high school either, but I didn't hate it like I did JHS. I was in JROTC and I did rather well in the class, when I graduated I was number 2 in the program and offered the full ride scholarship program - while I'm proud I was offered it I'm really glad I did not take it. I would not want to be in the military, especially now, with the benefit of hindsight. There's choices I would change about my past, but that's not one of them!

Going back to JHS, now that would be a nightmare! I was regularly bullied and had only a couple good friends.

I remember the episode, but not too many of the details. It's been a long time since I saw it. Part of why I'd like to revisit it would be to see if it lives up to my fond memories. I suspect it would, since more recently I have seen several clips of it on YouTube. I went on kind of a binge for a few months last year.

My worst spate of Dreams was years ago at Blockbuster, when the local server went down for weeks and all transactions were done by hand. I would wake up sitting in bed, going through air motions of writing receipts and unlocking cases. One time I woke up and had a stack of my own DVDs on the bed in front of me. I kept them on a shelf in another room at the time. Dark times.

@Tyranexx tell me about It. I just checked the radar and it says it's dropping to 25 a few days this week 😣.

@NEStalgia - Incredible. Blue Maple protocol initiated. Seed stratification commenced. Approximately seven to 10 days until phase two.

@HobbitGamer - Ooh, ears perked, thanks for the heads up. Loved that show, and my brother had a first person AYAOTD point and click game on the ole dark green Acer pc. It was actually kind of scary. That’s true nightmare you were having and living in the Blockbuster but no server days. The worst dreams are about work.

@Woomy_NNYes - Yeah, I killed a lot of plants in my day, but I was gifted a bunch of succulents a few years ago, and they helped me find my green thumb because they’re so forgiving. I’ve been trying for a while to have a little indoor tree garden of native hardwoods, but I can’t get anything to survive the transplant process from outdoors to indoors. The trees I’m selecting don’t qualify as true bonsai trees, and I’m starting to understand the reasoning now. I should have better luck with the maple and pine seeds. If I live long enough, and with a little luck, maybe a couple of them will survive to become mature bonsai.

@Tyranexx - The stories our brains weave while relaxing and bobbing along unencumbered in the lazy river of sleep are insane. A lot of them are just straight troll jobs too. I have one a few times a year that’s such a mean troll, my brain would get banned if it did it on the internet instead of just in my... mind, I guess. I often wonder how they could be my actual thoughts just banging around in there like extra, unused thoughts I forgot to think that day.

@Heavyarms55 - I have some bad news. I had that same “oh crap, I forgot about that class ALL semester” dream all through college, and off and on for the last 17 years. I don’t think it ends.

@bimmy-lee Well then... Guess I best get used to it!

@Heavyarms55 - Yep, it’s a gross one. Pure anxiety, and it sticks with me for a few hours after I wake up. Like, I’ll be drinking coffee and suddenly wonder for a split second what I’m going to do about that dang class. I was off by a year too. It’s 18 years. So plan on that at least.

@bimmy-lee Lovely. Still, at least the worse version of the dream has never returned since I finished. The last semester I was in uni, I had reoccuring nightmares of failing because I was in a situation where, if I failed to graduate that semester, I would not have any more money to finish, but I also would have no degree making the entire experience and all the debt, pointless. In the dreams, that happened, I ended up with all the student debt, but working alongside high school dropouts mocking me for wasting my time...

@Heavyarms55 - Oof, that’s a tough one. It’s as if your brain really put in some effort to strike to spin one of the timeless fears in failure. The anxiety in the final year of a program is probably widely relatable. I had a super senior fifth year for undergrad because I switched programs mid stream, and my only concern was getting out of there with a degree.

@Heavyarms55 My main problem in HS was boredom, plus most of my small friend group was older. My senior year was kind of lonely in some respects. There also weren't a lot of classes offered there that I was very interested in. There wasn't much of a technology program at the time. Congrats on the achievement in JROTC - I've heard of the program, but we didn't have it - but like you I probably wouldn't have taken it either. I'm not cut out for the military. Too much stubbornness, plus I love my sleep.

Your JHS experience sounds similar to mine, though the most severe stuff happened to me in fifth and six grade. HS had its own issues to be sure, but overall it wasn't as bad.

There are some decent clips out on YT of various DCAU highlights. I'll have to see if I can find clips of that episode. Those uploads tend to come and go.

@HobbitGamer Weeks? Good grief, I'm surprised management didn't have a seizure. Not sure how long that'd fly in the present.

@NintendoByNature We're getting some of that too, though it'll be above freezing for most of that period...ignoring wind chill. Looks like there's now a chance of snow Wednesday. Not a lot of accumulation, but it's supposedly gonna be blown around a lot. :/

@bimmy-lee Yep, it's definitely interesting how the brain can take a jumbled mess of thoughts and experiences and regurgitate them into something weird and (at times) wonderful. I can relate on the random thoughts; I've read most get these weird thoughts that pop up at the strangest moments. We typically don't notice them or pay them very little mind during the usual daily hullabaloo. There's way less mental structure during sleep I think.

@Tyranexx I had issues in elementary school too. But it just wasn't as bad as jr. high. I remember coming home from jr. high thinking that most people wouldn't even notice if I died, and most of the few that did would be better off with, or at least entertained by, my death. It wasn't that I was suicidal, it's just that I, for a time, felt like no one would care or miss me.

Thanks! It's not so much that I thought I wouldn't be cut out to be a soldier - though they'd likely have had to beat me into shape as I've never been athletic - but that I feared being an officer. I've read a lot of war stories and even the unrealistic ones talk about leaders sending people to their deaths and I don't think I could deal with that. And with the benefit of hindsight now, I don't support the actions of the US government and thus would have been unable to fight in some of the battles they might have ordered me to - I would not have been able to live with that. - Though to be clear, my problem is not with the military, it's with the the political leadership and not related to any one party and that's all I want to say about it here.

Yeah the copyright flags get DCAU taken down pretty quickly, even if they aren't monetized. I don't understand why they aren't on Netflix or some other streaming site. Seems like it would be an easy sell to me. I know JLU was on Netflix, years ago. Netflix drops or loses the rights to things all the time for reasons I don't understand. It's what prompted me to buy Battlestar Galactica on Blue Ray. My favorite work of fiction, I just had to have it.

@bimmy-lee Mine was a super-senior fifth year too. Because I studied abroad for a semester, I missed some fall-only classes that I needed and thus had to wait. That's one thing I would never change though, study abroad was the absolute best educational experience I ever had! I tell everyone, if they can, to take the opportunity to study abroad. Living in a foreign country, even just as a guest student for a semester, opens your eyes in ways you can never get in a classroom, no matter how good of a school you attend or how talented a teacher you have.

@bimmy-lee I've had such bad luck troubleshooting plants that I might ask someone at a nursery next time I have an issue.

@Tyranexx yep and just after I was getting used to seeing grass again.

@Tyranexx - That makes sense to me. If life is like an RPG, the day/work time is like a highly structured part of the story where we’re allowed very little variance from the path from point A to point B. Night time though, that’s the time our Brains are no longer bound by schedule and routine, and it’s just a free roam. Maybe a Zelda game is a better comparison. Daytime is like working through a dungeon and a boss battle, while night time is just Hyrule field for our minds.

@Heavyarms55 - I’m not sure I knew you studied abroad. Very cool. Was that in Japan, or somewhere else?

@Woomy_NNYes - Try to find a nice, dedicated plant store, and talk to the people in there. I’ve found that first hand information seems to be better than the general stuff you might find on the internet. Many times, they’ll know characteristics of the individual plants, and they can really help you give the plant what it needs to thrive. If you need to build a little confidence in your green thumb, get a low maintenance succulent, bamboo, or a money tree. You can earn your green thumb with those types of plants without worrying about killing them. They’re all very forgiving.

@bimmy-lee @Heavyarms55 I've had the "I forgot about that class" dream too. It lasts decades apparently. That's weird. There's something in human psychology that maintaining classes and school schedules permanently seriously effs up our brains. If it's one person it's a freak. If it's two people it's coincidence. 3 people is a trend. If classes mess up our brains that we permanently forever are messed up in our sleep by it...something's wrong with the way life is done! It was the same for me, a dream where you remembered you completely forgot about a class that was on your schedule and never actually went!

@Heavyarms55 Isn't "study abroad" basically a different way of saying "choose to be born to rich parents?"

@Heavyarms55 I actively dreaded going to school at that point in my life. All I wanted to do was stay home and read, play games, or spoil the animals (pets and livestock). I often had similar feelings; I never attempted suicide or anything like that, but there was an incident that led my parents to send me to counseling. In hindsight a few of my reactions to some horseplay that was perceived as teasing were overblown, but when you're so used to the real deal it's hard to distinguish between the two. I still have a hard time reading people and their intentions at times, but I'm a lot better at it now than I was then.

I've never been athletic either; I played volleyball in Jr. High (I was decent, but never a star), but I didn't really do anything sports related in HS besides Scholar Bowl. Your reasoning of not wanting to be an officer is why I decided not to have anything to do with the medical profession; I don't wish to be responsible for the lives of others and am unsure how I'd live with myself if I'd either knowingly or accidentally ended a life due to a mistake or a decision that needed to be made. I'm generally with you on respecting many who have served in the military, but not to many of the uses it has been put to; I also won't expand further on that here. Besides hindsight, you can thank a cousin of mine for that. He served as a Ranger in the US Army, and he suffers from PTSD and is a recovering alcoholic thanks to his experiences in the Middle East. He's actually written a book to help him heal from his experiences that I hope to read soon.

So I was correct in thinking that at least some of the DCAU used to be on Netflix. I understand that licenses need to be renewed every so often, but it's still irritating that many full series still require you to buy them if you want them all in one place since the alternative is losing access with little notice. Things like that are why I'm cautious about an all-digital future with most media until some processes are changed. With the popularity of many series, you'd think companies would be vying to try to cut through all the legal and corporate tape to try and get some monetary returns out of something that's popular. :shrug:

@NintendoByNature It'll be hiding again by this time tomorrow. Hopefully some of it gets killed off. While I like spring for the most part, I don't love tending to my lawn.

@bimmy-lee Life for me, depending on the day, is typically a RPG with visual novel, puzzle, and endless runner elements all thrown in. Weeknights are typically filled with pretty much every other genre that you can imagine.

Going off the Zelda comparison: daytime is like accidentally hitting No whenever Kaepora Gaebora says "Did you get all that?" in OoT.

@Tyranexx Good description. My life is generally an endless runner that keeps crashing. Somehow there is a grinding mechanic involved as well. I keep losing progress every time it crashes....I never seem to get to the next save point so I just replay the same part over and over and over, but usually the experience is worse each time.

Comparing to Kaepora isn't quite right though. I can eventually throw heavy objects at the screen and end the insanity. Can't do that in life without having to switch to playing NFS: Hot Pursuit followed by A Way Out.

@Tyranexx lol I have to travel for work tomorrow, so hopefully i won't be stuck in some ditch!

@NEStalgia - I’ve known several other people who have the dream, and I do think it’s a real trend as you say. One of my friends has it, except it’s about the bartending job he took after HS instead of going to college. Not sure if that qualifies as this dream, but it hits all the same beats. I’ve always kind of assumed it’s from the anxiety that comes with being out and on my own for the first time without the parental safety net, trying not to screw things up, but I was young and living the kind of lifestyle where I was pretty much always messing up something.

@Tyranexx - A lot of the time, my day time life feels like one of those Reins games where you just make a bunch of decisions quickly with only a vague understanding of the outcomes, while trying to keep an impossible amount of people content. It’s either that or Streets of Rage 2. I have to fight a lot of future punks. The neighborhood has really gone downhill.

@Tyranexx
Speaking about sports in scholl, i felt there are some sports has never introduced in the school despite the actual sports are exist. I never saw a school consider Boxing / Kickboxing as School Extra curricular. I think there was some negative stigma about boxing / kickboxing at some country due to the violence perception from Boxing / Kickboxing. A lot peoples still worried to let their kids join in Boxing as they concern their kids became more aggresive and like to hit their friends. But, i still saw some kids in other places or country have opportunity to be taught about Boxing lesson. What makes Boxing / Kickboxing are so underrated sport ?
I'm sick with soccer as too popular sport.

@bimmy-lee Low maintenance, huh? ha. I got a 3 foot tall Snake plant (sansevieria) a few years ago. 2 things happened. The plant was at a northwest window & I put solar heat reduction film on the windows. oof bad move. I may have actually underwatered too? But, the window film was probably the biggest problem. The film rejects 60% of sunlight, on a northern window, it just wasn't enough light. The plant kept dying slowly, leave by leaf. Had to get rid of the heat control film. (swapped those windows with other ones that didn't have film). But, it's funny that I screwed up so epic-ly with the low maintenance snake plant. So, I bought a new snake plant.