Hero

Shit bud, how many weeks of your life did you invest into that little game? Good thing it's possible to get paid for video games nowadays. Edit: Wait a minute, looks like you've only caught 102 of the critters. Pshaw, back in the day even I had more pokemanz than that.

Nice! I'm about to finish up my bachelor's this week, having taken two years longer to get around to it than most from my high school class, and still have what feels like a ton of writing to do in the next few days. But posts like this sure do put the petty and insignificant problems I face into scale.

The first thing I would think of is to find out what kind of wireless card your laptop uses and reinstall the latest driver. Then give it a week and see if it doesn't fix itself--most of the ISPs where I live are awful, even the big ones, and their connections have been known to flake out for a few days at a time for all kinds of reasons. I hate to jump to conclusions when they lead to a problem that's harder to fix, but if that doesn't change anything with your signal reception I think it's likely a problem with your WiFi, even if some other devices are still connecting. You could easily confirm that by bringing your laptop around to someone else's place or a business with a free hotspot and seeing if the problem persists. Routers die all the time and they tend to do so slowly.

Wow, I have trouble imagining spending less than $150-200 a month on food for myself. I just love eating too much and don't have the self control. Then again I'm sure it's doable if you're skinny and really push stuff like onions, cabbage and whole beans as your staples. Costco has high quality meat but it will lead you to break the bank if you're shopping for yourself. In fact Costco is a bad idea for personal shopping all around, anything that's not frozen or heavily preserved will likely start going bad before you use it all. What I do to save money is buy most of my meat at Hispanic or Asian markets where it's cheaper per pound and then separate it into freezer bags when I get home so that I don't ruin the quality by defrosting and refreezing everything multiple times. Those are also the places to get lots of veggies that are ridiculously overpriced in grocery stores like bell peppers. Another way to save money is if you know people who are in the military and there's a base nearby, get them to buy things for you at the commissary. That's how I stay rolling in steak and paper towels. In general the key to saving money on food is the same as with saving money on anything, shop around. 24 hour chain grocery stores like Safeway are the most convenient places to shop and might seem cheap but they gouge you wherever they think they can get away with it, even on items with a substantial price reduction listed.

Is it possible that your computer has been bumped or jostled much lately? I've run into this kind of problem with my desktop before a couple times after taking it on long car trips. I was able to get it purring again by opening it up and making sure all the cables were firmly connected. I very much doubt you would have this problem with a laptop though. Great post.

Something Awful is a veritable institution of internet culture, it's been around for years with the same paid registration system. Tons of memes, thread ideas and practices that are now incredibly widespread got their start on the Something Awful forums. I don't have an account personally but when I was in high school I would see people reading and posting on SA on public computers fairly frequently. Considering how big, popular, and well-established SA is I have trouble believing that you'd be exposing yourself to serious risks by signing up, unless you do something really stupid like admitting to murder and tying enough information to your account to positively identify yourself (it's been done before.) I think that compared to the risks you assume by opening a Facebook account and using it every day, the kinds of risks associated with an SA membership are doubtless pretty benign.

It's like the others have said. It's time to run a malware removal program.

Nonsense. Expressive writing is almost always more engaging. Taking a dry, neutral tone or using formulaic sentence structures will make most readers think, "what am I reading, a geometry textbook?" There are some people who like to read that kind of thing in their free time, even a lot of people, but many more do not.

Skimp on the motherboard? That sends up red flags in my mind. I would buy a cheap, small HDD and forget any dreams of SDDs or flashy cases and peripherals before I skimped on the motherboard. After all, it's what governs your options for future upgrades. Also, lower-end motherboards might not be as reliable as their full-featured counterparts. I was in the position of having motherboard troubles once as a teenager, and I would never want to go back there. When your mobo fails spectacularly, it can bring a lot of things down with it. Nice power supplies might seem expensive, but I think investing in a reliable, energy-efficient option like the Antec EarthWatts series is probably a good idea in the long run if you plan to keep the computer turned on most of the time over the next few years. There's a good chance you'll even see savings through your power bills, depending on what else you might have gone for.

Welcome to the world of building computers. With any luck at all, you will not regret your decision to take the plunge. At the very least you should be able to put together something that fills all of your specifications for half your budget. Personally, though, I would spring for something nicer if I was already planning to spend most of the money on it. I just built my a desktop for the first time this August and was very happy with the results. I could go into the tangible and intangible benefits of building your own machine for a couple paragraphs here, but seeing as you already posted this topic you probably have already heard it all. So without further ado, I'll pass on the link that my cousin gave me when I asked for advice this summer. Tom's Hardware is a great site for researching parts as well as scouting out successful builds that others have used. There's still a significant chunk of research involved, but if your experience is like mine this site will make the process a lot faster and more intuitive. In the end, all but five of the computer parts I bought corresponded to one of their recommended builds. Just remember, the most important thing to confirm is that everything you are buying is compatible with everything else!

I feel the same way, except that for me math was a struggle as compared with my classmates' experiences as far back as my first years of elementary school. I don't know if it's because my brain is wired differently, because I don't like doing daily homework assignments or because I just don't like and have trouble getting along with most math enthusiasts and teachers. I got math tutoring in elementary school through the special ed department and later on in the 7th grade, I was placed in special ed math which prevented me from being able to take any electives that year (although my parents eventually worked out an arrangement for me to attend Spanish two days a week.) In high school I was placed in the "slow track" math classes, where all of the students were more unmotivated and disruptive and the teachers more authoritarian and bitter than almost any I have met since. I truly hated every minute of those classes, and even managed to get kicked out of algebra 1 in the last 6 weeks of the year because the teacher decided that she couldn't deal with me and the rest of the class at the same time anymore--we hated each other and I felt like she initiated stupid power struggles with me every day in order to confirm to herself her authority over me and the class. I was allowed to finish the course in independent study with another teacher who took pity on my situation, and in that limited time frame managed to boost a C- to an A-. Next year I was in a geometry and failed the class when I didn't turn in some assignments at the end of the year that the teacher himself admitted he never read--isn't it great that the majority of your grade in almost every high school class rides on BS makework? I retook geometry in summer school and was able to get an A without ever having to think very hard. In my second two years of high school, I went to a much smaller school where academic "tracks" were a lot more flexible, and I got the idea that I wanted to continue with math since it involved so much less BS there. I put a lot of effort into it, and I was able to convince the AP calculus teacher to let me take his 8 AM class my senior year despite not having any of its prerequisites beyond geometry on the condition that I worked with a math analysis textbook over the summer. I did that and took the class, which I only just barely managed to pass with the help of a private tutor. Unfortunately, my experiences with college math have been more in line with my experiences with AP calculus (or worse) than summer school geometry. A lot of the time I even call myself a fool for choosing a math-intensive major like computer science when I know it's probably my biggest academic weak spot. So I don't know if I would recommend continuing with math if you consider it a "mortal enemy", even though I took the opposite route. Whether or not you intuitively like a subject has a lot to do in my experience with your innate untrained talent for that subject and your ability to quickly pick up skills related to it. Maybe I was just trying to strike back at all the teachers I hated for telling me I was a poor student and could never succeed in math, a futile attempt to prove them wrong. I really don't know, except that it feels good when you finally master something that nobody thought you would be able to do.

Different people struggle with different things in school. For me learning new vocabulary is a cinch, especially in English because as somebody who reads a lot I've usually seen all the words before. But I could see how somebody who isn't into learning languages the way I am might have a harder time, just like I seem to take significantly longer than most other computer science students to solve complicated math problems or internalize theorems. I would normally expect that the girl you're talking about is probably a strong English student because she's in AP English in 11th grade, but assuming anything is dangerous, and many parents pressure their kids to take AP classes in subjects that they have no particular interest or gift in because taking a lot of AP classes is seen as a mark of a good student. Taking shortcuts in school (i.e., cheating on tests) is very rarely a good idea, since even in a hypothetical zero-risk scenario you can over-leverage yourself and end up in classes (or even schools) that you aren't prepared to succeed in. If you always cheat on tests and never study, you'll probably also be a little bit lost most of the time in lectures and class discussions. Your teachers will probably expect more from you than you are prepared to deliver in general as well. So even when we hand-wave questions of risk and risk and integrity to the side, there is a very strong case to be made that cheating is a bad idea. However, I don't think that justifies tattling on your classmates, especially in an English class where in all likelihood your grades are not set to a curve. Unless you know this girl's life inside-out, I don't think it's right to judge her. If you really strongly disagree with her decision to cheat on a moral ground and you want to make sure she understands why you feel that way, maybe you could call her out in private, tell her what you saw and why you think it's not cool. But to rat her out and cause her to fail the test, and maybe the class, and maybe even get kicked out of school? Think about it. Would she be cheating in the first place if she wasn't under some kind of heavy pressure to succeed in the class? It's OK, even admirable sometimes to take a moral stand but we should always consider the potential harm and benefit of our actions to others. Making somebody else's life take a turn for the worse by turning them in is a lot more likely to cause anger and resentment than recalcitrance. You might say that she has accepted the risk by choosing to cheat, but the difference is that if she gets caught on her own it's on her, not on you.

No, I don't know the meaning of life and death, but I do know the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I read it in a book.

People who voted for Stein bother me. First off, she's not a genuine leftist so it makes little sense to say you voted for her because she has positions to the "left" of Obama. Second, she's part of a political culture based on exclusionary "litmus tests," not all that different when you think about it from the right wing of the Republican Party. And third, a lot of her articulated positions reveal a clear lack of basis in the reality that most of us live. A political leader has to be a master of nuance to orchestrate large scale political coordination, and Harvard degree or no Jill Stein is anything but that. She's the kind of figure that I think would actually become less popular if she got more media exposure. I see how it's easy to see this presidential election through the lens of disagreement with both major candidates, but unless you genuinely preferred the prospect of a President Romney over more President Obama, I don't see why you would vote for anyone but Obama. All of the polls had been indicating for a long time that it would be a very close race, and it was. It's not like making an educated vote isn't a hassle. If you're willing to go through that hassle, why would you cast it in a way that you know ultimately has no impact? Most of the people who share your ideas will probably be voting for a major candidate anyway.

你不了解中文嗎？ 我不覺得了這兒沒有太多人說中文。 對不起，我是二年級的中文學生。我的中文不很流利。

It's not good news, but we should be inured after what already happened to the series with the new trilogy. At least we might see a renaissance in the EU and the world of Star Wars video games, as followed the release of the last movies, and that could be a good thing. Of course, this acquisition might also mean the complete "Clone Warsization" of the Star Wars canon, but even in that case most of us will probably pay to see the next Star Wars movie just because it's Star Wars, so you could say that the deal will definitely have been a success in the short term at least.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4284423,00.html http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4295680,00.html You understand that this distinction between the Obama and Romney platforms existed only in your mind? And the idea that Obama would just stand by and let the Iranians drop a nuclear bomb wherever they want is completely preposterous. Standard Democratic Party kumbaya rhetoric aside, Obama's record is anything but dovish. I used to not be very proud of my country of origin but I hate when people speak slanderous distortions about it. I would think a completely self-conscious Israeli like you would be more careful about that kind of thing. You have no proof, and what you are saying is simply not true. These are some very extreme opinions you are relating, I would say it even strays into the realm of conspiracy theory. I think you've been paying way too much credence to right wing news sources. That's never a good idea, you can go outright delusional if you take it too far. Unless of course you're actually a right winger, in which case you probably believe everybody who isn't one is delusional.

Sorry to burst your bubble man, but whether the Democrats or the Republicans control the White House has very little to do with US foreign policy in the Old World. As somebody who follows international news this was something that wasn't easy for me to accept but it's true. It's not hard to see that Obama's foreign policy is a continuation of Bush's, which is in turn a continuation of Clinton's, etc. Administrations come and go, but State Department employees straight up to the top levels are technocrats who usually stay put. Consequently, actual policy formulation and direct international dialogue tends to be somewhat independent of the latest rhetorical nuance out of the White House. The State Department is sometimes responsive to public opinion, but apart from that its activities are pretty divorced from our day to day political process. News flash: The entire world refers to the West Bank as "occupied territories" despite the history of the area. Do you really think that a President Romney would have used a different terminology? George Bush didn't, and neither did his father or Ronald Reagan before him. Where's the motivation in that? As for Obama not condemning an Egyptian attack on Israel: http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=284997 If Egypt attacks Israel, they can expect the immediate cessation of US aid and political support. And knowing Obama, he would probably also take powerful steps to support Israel's war effort because to fail to do so would mean a major embarrassment for the Democrats and resultant losses at the polls. Believe it or not popular support for Israel is very widespread in the US even among non-Jews, it's probably the only country apart from Israel itself where a majority (about 65%) of the population hold a positive opinion about Israel as opposed to a strictly neutral or outright negative one. It's true that Obama and Netanyahu hate each other personally, but in this part of the world diplomatic relationships aren't governed by personal relationships. I think that Obama's spectacle in the UN in 2011 was ample proof of where his true loyalties lie, especially keeping in mind that a major plank of his election platform in 2008 was improving relations with the Muslim world. By the way, if you really think Morsi is about to launch a repeat of 1973 I think that you're pretty out of touch with what's actually happening in Egypt right now. I mean, anything is possible, and it's true that the risk of terrorist attacks across the border from Sinai is only becoming greater, but that was also an issue during Mubarak's tenure. Obviously the Ikhwan will never be Israel's best friend but I don't see how they represent a greater threat to Israel than the previous regime. I guess there's that they have a closer working relationship with Hamas, but do you really think that the Egyptian army in its current state would mobilize because of another Cast Lead? I just don't see it. Lebanon is a different story. I very much doubt that Lebanon will launch a war on Israel anytime soon, the country is too divided already, but Hezbullah has certainly been pushed into a corner in the last months and I could see anything happening from that corner. I suppose it all depends on what signals come out of the Assad government in Syria and Tehran. How can you be certain the war is coming to Israel this summer, if you aren't certain that that anybody will begin that war? Pessimists say this every year about the Middle East, war is coming this summer, war is coming this fall, war is coming this spring, you would think that the whole region was erupting like Syria. Why wasn't the war this fall, or this summer, like so many experts predicted? That took a bit longer to type than I thought it would. Far From the Forest probably isn't the best place for this kind of thing, but oh well.

I used Firefox until some time in late 2009 or the first couple months of 2010. At that point Firefox had been running lethargically on my computer for many updates, which is especially noticeable to someone like me who usually keeps about twenty tabs open at a time. I had also been running into lots of crashes in the previous months compared to almost none in the years before. I wasn't nearly as software and operating system-literate then as I am now, so I don't know exactly why I was running into so many issues with Firefox that many others seem not to have, but by the time a friend convinced me to give Google Chrome a spin I was fed up enough with browser problems that I made it my primary browser and haven't looked back since. My romance with Google Chrome hasn't been without its ups and downs, but overall I will say that Chrome has in my experience been a faster, more stable browser than Firefox. Firefox still has the edge in customization potential, but the gap between the two browsers in that area has narrowed tremendously since my adoption, to the point where there are only a few things that I would ever want to do that are possible in Firefox but not in Chrome, and none that I would ever want to do more often than every few months. I say install both Google Chrome and Firefox. That way, you can use whichever one you like better and if you change your mind about which one that is or run into a web page that's incompatible with one of them (it happens), you already have everything you need.

I take back a part of my previous comment, I just spent a good chunk of my afternoon reading through a couple of the niche-appeal subreddits. The discussions on Reddit definitely have a compelling appeal of their own, far above and beyond the (generally paltry) web content that gets linked.

Fuck cold days, man. I think you're a chump if you live somewhere where the ambient temperature routinely goes below freezing. That might seem offensive now, but there's a good chance you'll agree with me after you move. I hear Dresden is a bleak and depressive place right now, at least as far as the weather is concerned.

Welcome to the Forest, and congratulations on the birthday! With any luck you'll still be here for many birthdays more. The interests you mentioned in video games, Lego and writing should go over well here, they're definitely all things that are popular in this community. I'm not sure I would have mentioned that I was from Canada in my first post, though. Everybody around here knows that Canadians are slippery characters. We US Americans just aren't sure whose side you'd end up on a take two of the 1776 war. At least you guys aren't as perfidious as the original limeys though.

Why would you quit pot just to kick up your tobacco habit a notch? That seems like a downward shimmy on the smoking totem pole if you ask me. Drug tests? I smoke tons of weed and it's never been super hard for me to cut down massively when I really have to, provided I get plenty of coffee and not too much free time. Definitely a lot easier than kicking tobacco or drinking. Heck, I find it a hell of a lot harder to come off of a weeks-long computer game playing binge than a comparable weed binge. Why e-cigs? I'm not trying to judge you or anything like that, but they always struck me as a very expensive and not particularly rewarding habit for somebody who isn't already trying to quit the analog cigarettes. Apple's not that bad, sometimes I prefer the nuanced flavor and old-timey appeal of classic apple tobaccos over the esoteric and often cloyingly sweet fruit flavors that people seem to gravitate towards in the US. I've got to echo you on watermelon being a good choice though. I like to add a few pinches of mint tobacco to any flavor that I use. Good luck with that.

I don't really use any of those three sites. Of them probably the one I find most often through Google results is Tumblr, and my housemates go on Reddit all the time. I almost never browse the internet without already having a clear idea in mind of what page I'm looking for, or at the very least a specific set of search terms to try in Google. In my experience entertainment-focused "content portal" sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc. are more oriented toward people who are bored and have trouble finding things that hold their attention or simply who are lacking in Google-fu. They are great, though, when you're tried and you have a bunch of time to kill and just want to find something new and interesting to read, look at or watch without needing to think too hard.

Funnily enough I also picked up smoking in Israel. Tobacco products are (or were) much cheaper there than anywhere I've lived in the States, and hoookahs and their accessories are generally half the price and made to a higher standard compared to what I've commonly seen in the US. I always smoked rollies to avoid some of the impact of the high "vice taxes" Washington state imposes on cigarettes. After a couple years though I realized that smoking was becoming a lot more of a identity-defining habit than I wanted it to, and that I had long since stopped feeling the rush or buzz that had drawn me to tobacco the first time I tried it, and that my lungs always felt like shit. So I figured that my pocket money would be better used on other things, and I stopped buying tobacco products altogether and left my hookah with a friend when I moved. Since then I've had the occasional rendezvous with tobacco, always while under the influence of something else, but I consider myself to have essentially quit and turn down the offer to take a drag nine times out of ten.